The Truth About Forever

  “Here.” I handed him the tray I’d just finished and took his empty one. “There should be crab cakes in the next few minutes, too.”

  “Thanks,” he said. Then he recognized me. “Hey,” he said. “You work here now?”

  “Um, no.” I put the empty tray down in front of me. “Not really.”

  I glanced over at my mother. Between Delia’s heartfelt “sorry” and my exchange with Bert, I could see she was struggling to keep up. “Well,” she said finally, turning her attention back to Delia, “I appreciate your apology, and that seems like fair compensation. The food is wonderful.”

  “Thank you so much,” Delia said. “I really appreciate it.”

  Just then there was a burst of laughter from the living room, happy party noise, and my mother glanced toward it, as if reassured. “Well,” she said, “I suppose I should get back to my guests.” She started out of the room, then paused by the fridge. “Macy?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “When you’re done in here, I could use you. Okay?”

  “Sure,” I said, grabbing a pot holder and heading over to the oven to check on the crab cakes. “I’ll be there in a sec.”

  “She’s been wonderful, by the way,” Delia told her. “I told her if she needs work, I’ll hire her in a second.”

  “That’s so nice of you,” my mother said. “Macy’s actually working at the library this summer.”

  “Wow,” Delia said. “That’s great.”

  “It’s just at the information desk,” I told her, opening the oven door. “Answering questions and stuff.”

  “Ah,” Delia said. “A girl with all the answers.”

  “That’s Macy.” My mother smiled. “She’s a very bright girl.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this—what could you say to this?—so I just reached in for the crab cakes, focusing on that. When my mother left the kitchen, Delia came over, pot holder in hand, and took the tray as I slid it out of the oven. “You’ve been a great help,” she said, “really. But you’d better go out there with your mom.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “She won’t even notice I’m not there.”

  Delia smiled. “Maybe not. But you should go anyway.”

  I stepped back, out of the way, as she carried the tray over to the island. In her car seat, Lucy shifted slightly, mumbling to herself, then fell quiet again.

  “So the library, huh?” she said, picking up her spatula. “That’s cool.”

  “It’s just for the summer,” I told her. “I’m filling in for someone. ”

  She started lifting crab cakes off the cookie sheet, arranging them on a tray. “Well, if it doesn’t work out, I’m in the book. I could always use someone who can take directions and walk in a straight line.”

  As if to punctuate this, Monica slunk back in, blowing her bangs out of her face.

  “Catering is an insane job, though,” Delia said. “I don’t know why you’d want to do it, when you have a peaceful, normal job. But if for some reason you’re craving chaos, call me. Okay?”

  Bert came back in, breezing between us, his tray now empty. “Crab cakes!” he bellowed. “Keep ’em coming!”

  “Bert,” Delia said, wincing, “I’m right here.”

  I walked back to the door, stepping aside as Monica ambled past me, yawning widely. Bert stood by impatiently, waiting for his tray, while Delia asked Monica to God, please, try and pick up the pace a little, I’m begging you. They’d forgotten about me already, it seemed. But for some reason, I wanted to answer her anyway. “Yeah,” I said, out loud, hoping she could hear me. “Okay.”

  The last person at the party, a slightly tipsy, very loud man in a golf sweater, left around nine-thirty. My mother locked the door behind him, took off her shoes, and, after kissing my forehead and thanking me, headed off to her office to assemble packets for people who had signed the YES! I WANT MORE INFO sheet she’d had on the front hall table. Contacts were everything, I’d learned. You had to get to people fast, or they’d slip away.

  Thinking this, I went up to my room and checked my email. Jason had written me, as promised, but it was mostly about things that he wanted to remind me of concerning the info desk (make sure to keep track of all copier keys, they are very expensive to replace) or other things I was handling for him while he was away (remember, on Saturday, to send out the email to the Foreign Culture group about the featured speaker who is coming in to give that talk in August). At the very end, he said he was too tired to write more and he’d be in touch in a couple of days. Then just his name, no “love.” Not that I’d been expecting it. Jason wasn’t the type for displays of affection, either verbal or not. He was disgusted by couples that made out in the hallways between classes, and got annoyed at even the slightest sappy moments in movies. But I knew that he cared about me: he just conveyed it more subtly, as concise with expressing this emotion as he was with everything else. It was in the way he’d put his hand on the small of my back, for instance, or how he’d smile at me when I said something that surprised him. Once I might have wanted more, but I’d come around to his way of thinking in the time we’d been together. And we were together, all the time. So he didn’t have to do anything to prove how he felt about me. Like so much else, I should just know.

  But this was the first time we were going to be apart for more than a weekend since we’d gotten together, and I was beginning to realize that the small reassurances I got in person would not transfer over to email. But he loved me, and I knew that. I’d just have to remember it now.

  After I logged off, I opened my window and crawled out onto the roof, sitting against one of the shutters with my knees pulled up to my chest. I’d been out there for a little while, looking at the stars, when I heard voices coming up from the driveway. A car door shut, then another. Peering over the edge, I saw a few people moving around the Wish Catering van as they packed up the last of their things.

  “. . . this other planet, that’s moving within the same trajectory as Earth. It’s only a matter of time before it hits us. I mean, they don’t talk about these things on the news. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”

  It was Bert talking. I recognized his voice, a bit high-pitched and anxious, before I made him out, standing by the back of the van. He was talking to someone who was sitting on the bumper smoking a cigarette, the tip of which was bright and red in the murky dark.

  “Ummm-hmmm,” the person said slowly. Had to be Monica. “Really.”

  “Bert, give it a rest,” another voice said, and Wes, the older guy, walked up, sliding something into the back of the van. I’d hardly seen him that night, as he’d worked the bar in the den.

  “I’m just trying to help her be informed!” Bert said indignantly. “This is serious stuff, Wes. Just because you prefer to stay in the dark—”

  “Are we ready to go?” Delia came down the driveway, her voice uneven, Lucy on her hip. She had the car seat dangling from one hand, and Wes walked up and took it from her. From where I was sitting, I could make out clearly the top of his head, the white of his shirt. Then, as if sensing this, he leaned his head back, glancing up. I slid back against the wall.

  “Did we get paid?” Bert asked.

  “Had to comp half,” she said. “The price of chaos. Probably should bother me, but frankly, I’m too pregnant and exhausted to care. Who has the keys?”

  “I do,” Bert said. “I’ll drive.”

  The silence that followed was long enough to make me want to peer over the edge of the roof again, but I stopped myself.

  “I don’t think so,” Delia said finally.

  “Don’t even,” Monica added.

  “What?” Bert said. “Come on! I’ve had my permit for a year! I’m taking the test in a week! And I have to have some more practice before I get the Bertmobile.”

  “You have,” Wes said, his voice low, “to stop calling it that.”

  “Bert,” Delia said, sighing, “normally, I would love for you to drive.
But it’s been a long night and right now I just want to get home, okay? Next time, it’s all you. But for now, just let your brother drive. Okay?”

  Another silence. Someone coughed.

  “Fine,” Bert said. “Just fine.”

  I heard a car door slam, then another. I leaned back over to see Wes and Bert still standing at the back of the van. Bert was kicking at the ground, clearly sulking, while Wes stood by impassively.

  “It’s not a big deal,” he said to Bert after a minute, pulling a hand through his hair. Now I knew for sure that they were brothers. They looked even more alike to me, although the similarities—skin tone, dark hair, dark eyes—were distributed on starkly different builds.

  “I never get to drive,” Bert told him. “Never. Even lazy Monotone got to last week, but never me. Never.”

  “You will,” Wes said. “Next week you’ll have your own car, and you can drive whenever you want. But don’t push this issue now, man. It’s late.”

  Bert stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Whatever,” he said, and started around the van, shuffling his feet. Wes followed him, clapping a hand on his back. “You know that girl who was in the kitchen tonight, helping Delia?” Bert asked.

  I froze.

  “Yeah,” Wes answered. “The one you leaped out at?”

  “Anyway,” Bert said loudly, “don’t you know who she is?”

  “No.”

  Bert pulled open the back door. “Yeah, you do. Her dad—”

  I waited. I knew what was coming, but still, I had to hear the words that would follow. The ones that defined me, set me apart.

  “—was the coach when we used to run in that kids’ league, back in elementary school,” Bert finished. “The Lakeview Zips. Remember?”

  Wes opened the back door for Bert. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Coach Joe, right?”

  Right, I thought, and felt a pang in my chest.

  “Coach Joe,” Bert repeated, as he shut his door. “He was a nice guy.”

  I watched Wes walk to the driver’s door and pull it open. He stood there for a second, taking a final look around, before climbing in and shutting the door behind him. I had to admit, I was surprised. I’d gotten so used to being known as the girl whose dad died, I sometimes forgot that I’d had a life before that.

  I moved back into the shadows by my window as the engine started up and the van bumped down the driveway, brake lights flashing as it turned out onto the street. There was a big wishbone painted on the side, thick black paint strokes, and from a distance it looked like a Chinese character, striking even if you didn’t know, really, what it meant. I kept my eye on it, following it down through the neighborhood, over the hill, down to the stop sign, until it was gone.

  Chapter Three

  I couldn’t sleep.

  I was starting my job at the library the next day, and I had that night-before-the-first-day-of-school feeling, all jumpy and nervous. But then again, I’d never been much of a sleeper. That was the weird thing about that morning when my dad came in to get me. I’d been out. Sound asleep.

  Since then, I had almost a fear of sleeping, sure that something bad would happen if I ever allowed myself to be fully unconscious, even for a second. As a result, I only allowed myself to barely doze off. When I did sleep enough to dream, it was always about running.

  My dad loved to run. He’d had me and my sister doing it from a young age with the Lakeview Zips, and later he was always dragging us to the 5Ks he ran, signing us up for the kids’ division. I remember my first race, when I was six, standing there at the starting line a few rows back, with nothing at my eye level but shoulders and necks. I was short for my age, and Caroline had of course pushed her way to the front, stating clearly that at ten-almost-eleven, she didn’t belong in back with the babies. The starting gun popped and everyone pushed forward, the thumping of sneakers against asphalt suddenly deafening, and at first it was like I was carried along with it, my feet seeming hardly to touch the ground. The people on the sides of the street were a blur, faces blowing by: all I could focus on was the ponytail of the girl in front of me, tied with a blue grosgrain ribbon. Some big boy bumped me hard from the back, passing, and I had a cramp in my side by the second length, but then I heard my dad.

  “Macy! Good girl! Keep it up, you’re doing great!”

  I knew by the time I was eight years old that I was fast, faster than the kids I was running with. I knew even before I started to pass the bigger kids in the first length, even before I won my first race, then every race. When I was really going, the wind whistling in my ears, I was sure that if I wanted to, it was only another burst of breath, one more push, and I could fly.

  By then it was just me running. My sister had lost interest around seventh grade, when she discovered her best event was not, as we’d all thought, the hundred meters, but in fact flirting with the boy’s track team afterwards. She still liked to run, but didn’t much see the point anymore if she didn’t have someone chasing after her.

  So it was me and my dad who went to meets, who woke up early to do our standard five-mile loop, who compared T-band strains and bad-knee horror stories over icepacks and PowerBars on Saturday mornings. It was the best thing we had in common, the one part of him that was all mine. Which was why, that morning, I should have been with him.

  From that morning on, running changed for me. It didn’t matter how good my times were, what records I’d planned to break just days before. There was one time I would never beat, so I quit.

  By altering the familiar route that took me past the intersection of Willow and McKinley whenever I went out, and looping one extra block instead, I’d been able to avoid the place where everything had happened: it was that easy, really, to never drive past it again. My friends from the track team were a bit harder. They’d stuck close to me, loyal, at the funeral and the days afterwards, and while they were disappointed when the coach told them I’d quit, they were even more hurt when I started to avoid them in the halls. Nobody seemed to understand that the only person I could count on not to bring up my dad, not to feel sorry for me, or make The Face—other than my mother—was me. So I narrowed my world, cutting out everyone who’d known me or who tried to befriend me. It was the only thing I knew to do.

  I packed up all my trophies and ribbons, piling them neatly into boxes. It was like that part of my life, my running life, was just gone. It was almost too easy, for something I once thought had meant everything.

  So now I only ran in my dreams. In them, there was always something awful about to happen, or there was something I’d forgotten, and my legs felt like jelly, not strong enough to hold me. Whatever else varied, the ending was the same, a finish line I could never reach, no matter how many miles I put behind me.

  “Oh, right.” Bethany looked up at me through her slim, wire-framed glasses. “You’re starting today.”

  I just stood there, holding my purse, suddenly entirely too aware of the nail I’d broken as I unfastened my seat belt in the parking lot. I’d put so much time into getting dressed for this first day, ironing my shirt, making my hair part perfectly straight, redoing my lipstick twice. Now, though, my nail, ripped across the top, jagged, seemed to defeat everything, even as I tucked it into my palm, hiding it.

  Bethany pushed back her chair and stood up. “You can sit on the end, I guess,” she said, reaching over to unlatch the knee-high door between us and holding it open as I stepped through. “Not in the red chair, that’s Amanda’s. The one next to it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I walked over, pulling the chair from the desk, then sat down, stowing my purse at my feet. A second later I heard the door squeak open again and Amanda, Bethany’s best friend and the student council secretary, came in. She was a tall girl with long hair she always wore in a neat braid that hung halfway down her back. It looked so perfect that during long meetings, when my mind wandered from the official agenda, I’d sometimes wondered if she slept in it, or if it was like a clip-on tie, easily removed at the end of th
e day.

  “Hello Macy,” she said coolly, taking a seat in her red chair. She had perfect posture, shoulders back, chin up. Maybe the braid helped, I thought. “I forgot you were starting today.”

  “Um, yeah,” I said. They both looked at me, and I was distinctly aware of that um, so base, hanging in the air between us. I said, more clearly, “Yes.”

  If I was working toward perfect—working being the operative word—these girls had already reached it and made maintaining it look effortless. Bethany was a redhead with short hair she wore tucked behind her ears, and had small freckled hands with the nails cut straight across. I’d sat beside her in English, and had always been transfixed when I saw her taking notes: her print was like a typewriter, each letter exact. She was quiet and always composed, while Amanda was more talkative, with a cultured accent she’d picked up from her early years in Paris, where her family had lived while her father did graduate work at the Sorbonne. I’d never seen either of them sporting a shirt with a stain on it, or even a wrinkle. They never used anything but proper English. They were the female Jasons.

  “Well, it’s been really slow so far this summer,” Amanda said to me now, smoothing her hands over her skirt. She had long, pale white legs. “I hope there’s enough for you to do.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just smiled my fine-just-fine smile again and turned back to the wall that my desk area faced. Behind me, I could hear them start talking, their voices low and soothing. They were saying something about an art exhibit. I looked at the clock. It was 9:05. Five hours, fifty-five minutes to go.

  By noon, I’d answered only one question, and it concerned the location of the bathroom. (So it wasn’t just in my house. Anywhere, I looked like I knew about the toilet, if nothing else.) There’d been a fair amount of activity at the desk: a problem with the copy machine, some inquiries into an obscure periodical, even someone with a question about the online encyclopedia that Jason had specifically trained me to handle. But even if Amanda or Bethany was helping someone else and the person came right to me, one of them jumped up, saying, “I’ll be with you in just a second,” in a tone that made it clear asking me would be a waste of time. The first few times this happened, I’d figured they were just letting me get my feet under me. After awhile, though, it was obvious. In their minds, I didn’t belong there.