What she can’t bear to say is that, really, she just wants an excuse to keep him close.
“Shouldn’t be too hard to find another UCLA sweatshirt at UCLA,” he says, and then he shakes his head in wonder. “I can’t believe I’ll be there later today.”
“I know,” Clare says. “It’s so weird. I’ve looked at a million pictures of Dartmouth, but it’s still hard to imagine actually being there.”
“I can picture it,” Aidan says, squeezing his eyes shut. “I’m seeing leaves. Lots and lots of leaves.” He opens one eye to look at her. “Is it always fall at Dartmouth? I think every picture I’ve ever seen has some sort of foliage.”
“Yes, it’s always fall at Dartmouth.”
He closes his eyes again. “Just what I thought. And I always imagine you sitting on a bench, for some reason, under a tree with a million different-colored leaves—”
“Even purple?”
“Sure, why not?” he says. “And you’ll just be sitting there with your bag of books and your cup of coffee and your fall coat, thinking important, college-y thoughts.”
“I have a feeling,” Clare says with a little smile, “that what I’ll actually be thinking about is you.”
“At first, yeah,” Aidan says, looking over at her with a more somber expression. “But not later. Trust me on this. The day will come when you’ll be sitting there looking up at the sky, and you won’t be thinking of me at all. You won’t need to anymore. And it’ll be a good thing, because it means you’ll be happy.”
“I don’t know,” she says quietly. “That’s pretty hard to imagine.”
Aidan only smiles. “You’ll see,” he says, closing his eyes again as he listens to the rain. Clare watches him for a moment, desperately trying to collect all the little pieces of him that she hopes to take with her: the freckles on the tips of his ears, his pale eyelashes, the curve of his hairline, even the half-moon bruises beneath each eye.
“There’s a third option, you know,” she says, and when he moves his head to the side, his eyes take a second to focus.
“To what?”
“To us,” she says, her heart straining hard against her rib cage. “We keep tossing around these two possibilities: End things now or let it fizzle out. But there’s a third option.”
“What,” he asks with a wry smile, “happily ever after?”
“No,” she says quickly. “Come on. I’m serious.”
He raises his arms in a stretch. “Okay, then what?”
“Later.”
“There is no later,” he says, holding out his wrist. He taps twice on the glass face of his watch. “Time’s a-ticking.”
“No, that’s the third possibility,” she says, her words nearly lost to the hum of the rain, which has wrapped the porch in a glossy curtain. “That we’ll come back to each other later.”
Aidan’s eyes are fixed on her, and there’s something hopeful in his gaze, something expectant. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she says. “After we’ve learned some stuff and done some things. We keep thinking there are only these two choices: We either grow apart or grow together. But maybe we can just kind of each grow on our own, and see how it goes. And then later, if it’s right, we’ll come back to each other and start again.”
“Later,” he says, as if testing the word.
She nods. “Later.”
“Like a second prologue.”
“There’s no such thing,” she says, shaking her head, but this doesn’t seem to bother him. He only smiles.
“Who says?”
This time, when the door swings open behind them, they both know what it means. Clare’s stomach drops, and she can see a flicker of alarm in Aidan’s eyes.
“Sorry to interrupt,” her mom says from the doorway, her voice full of apology. “But it’s time to load the car.”
Even after they’ve stood up, the chairs continue to rock back and forth, and the rain continues to fall all around the porch, shimmering and insistent. Aidan manages a small smile just before they walk inside, but when Clare tries to match it, she can’t.
The time has come, and there’s no more outrunning it.
Inside, her dad is walking down the stairs with a cardboard box. But when he notices them, he sets it down, his eyes widening as he catches sight of Aidan’s face.
“You look worse than Clare,” he says, reaching out to shake his hand.
“I know,” her mom says, glancing worriedly at Aidan. “We have some frozen corn, if you want to grab a bag.”
“Corn?” her dad scoffs. “Come on. At least give the boy a steak or something. It’s clearly been a rough night.”
Clare’s mom rolls her eyes. “You’re welcome to whatever you’d like,” she says, patting Aidan on the shoulder as she moves around him to the stairs. “You know that.” Just before walking up, she turns around once more, and this time, her voice quivers a little bit. “You’re always welcome here.”
Right then, the thing that kills Clare the most is that her mom doesn’t even know yet. When she’d dashed inside before to tell them she was home, she couldn’t bear to let them know it was over. It would only make it more real.
Besides, she figures they have hours ahead of them for all that, hours when she’ll stare out the car window and tell them all the reasons why this makes sense, why it was the logical thing to do—ending things with Aidan—in the hope that if she just keeps explaining, it might keep her from crying.
Though, of course, it won’t.
But now she realizes that her mom doesn’t need to be told after all; she already seems to know. And Clare is grateful for that, because it means she won’t actually have to say the words later. Instead, she can curl up in the backseat and let her mom pass her juice boxes and let her dad find something upbeat on the radio as they drive through Illinois and then Indiana and then Ohio, and on and on to New Hampshire, putting the miles between her and Aidan one at a time, until the moment when his flight takes off, and the distance between them will all at once be too great to count.
For the next ten minutes, the four of them troop in and out of the house, Bingo at their heels, as they carry suitcases and shopping bags, cardboard boxes of various sizes, pillows and lamps and even a football.
“Since when do you play football?” Aidan asks when he sees Clare walking through the kitchen with it tucked under her arm. He whisks it away from her, then stands near the sink, flipping it over and over in his hands.
“I don’t know,” she says with a shrug. “I feel like it’s the kind of thing you do in college. You know, toss a football around on the quad. Or is that Hacky Sack?”
He throws the ball to her, a gentle toss that spirals over the kitchen table, but somehow she still manages to fumble it.
“There goes my college athletic career,” she says, bending to grab the ball. “But I’m still bringing it.”
“When I said you should try some new things,” Aidan says, “I wasn’t really talking about contact sports.”
“Yeah, well, you won’t be laughing when I come back a seasoned quarterback.”
“Now that I’d like to see,” he says as they walk outside together.
In the driveway, her dad is shutting the trunk of the car. He’s wearing a bright yellow slicker with the hood pulled up, and his glasses are speckled with rain.
“I think that’s pretty much everything,” he says. “Unless you want to take the kitchen sink, too.”
“Very funny,” Clare says, but already there’s a lump in her throat, because she would, if she could: She’d rip that stupid, leaky sink right out of the wall and take it with her. For a brief, surging, impossible moment, she wants it all: her dog and her bed and her parents and her boyfriend. Even now, with just minutes to go, she has no idea how she’s going to leave any of it behind.
Her mom steps outside with the end of Bingo’s leash in one hand and a plastic bag full of sandwiches in the other. She locks the door and then turns around, staring at the odd rain-soake
d trio assembled in the driveway, all of them looking back at her with obvious reluctance.
“I guess we’re all set,” she says, glancing down at the dog. Bingo is holding his leash in his mouth and wagging his tail, completely oblivious to the fact that they’ll be dropping him off at the kennel on their way out of town. “This is it, huh?
Her dad nods a bit too enthusiastically. “The start of a big adventure.”
“We’ll just give you two a minute,” her mom says, then walks over to Aidan, standing on her tiptoes to give him a quick hug.
“We’ll miss you,” she says. “Good luck out there, okay?”
“Okay,” Aidan manages. “And thanks for everything.”
Her dad claps him on the shoulder, which turns into a hug. “Take care of yourself.”
Aidan nods. “Drive safe.”
And then they’re getting into the car, the engine rumbling to life and the windshield wipers squealing, and Clare is struck by a panic so strong that she feels her heart might gallop straight out of her chest.
This is it, she thinks, frozen in place. Even after all these hours—all these months, really—she’s still oddly stunned to have arrived here in this moment, which feels like it’s happening both much too fast and far too slowly.
She wipes some rain out of her eyes and forces herself to look up at Aidan, who is standing a few feet away from her, his face pale and his eyes filled with dread.
“Last chance to run away together,” he says, attempting a smile, though there’s something wobbly about it. “I hear Canada is nice this time of year.”
“I think I’d prefer the desert island.”
“Even if I refuse to wear a hula skirt?”
“Even then,” she says, reaching out to take his hand, terrified about what happens next. Because how do you say goodbye to a piece of yourself? She examines his hand, tracing a finger over his palm, playing connect-the-dots with the constellation of freckles on his wrist. “This is the worst, huh?”
“It’s definitely not the best.”
“Do you think we’ll be miserable?”
“Yes,” he says simply. “For a while, anyway.”
“And then?”
“And then it’ll get easier.”
“Promise?”
“No,” he says with a feeble smile. “So… really no contact at all?”
For a moment, she wants desperately to take it back. Because it’s hard to imagine not being able to text him on the drive out there, not being able to call after she meets Beatrice, not getting messages from him between classes. But she knows this is the way it has to be, and so, with great effort, she shakes her head.
Aidan nods. “No phone calls?”
“Nope.”
“Texts?”
“Nope.”
“E-mails? Letters? Postcards?”
“Sorry.”
“Carrier pigeons?”
“Oh, sure,” she says. “Pigeons are totally fine.”
“Well, at least there’s something,” he says with a grin.
“Aidan,” she says, grabbing the front of his shirt and giving it a little tug. Somewhere inside her, an army of tears is on the move, the pressure building behind her eyes and in her throat. Soon, it will be too much. Whatever dams might exist—whatever walls she’s managed to throw up—will surely break, and all the many hollows of her heart will be flooded. It takes all her strength to fight against it, because there are still things to be said, and she can’t bear for them to be muddled.
But even this seems beyond her at the moment.
“I don’t…” she begins, but quickly falters.
Aidan only nods. “Me neither.”
“I wish…”
“I know,” he says. “Me too.”
She gives up then, stepping into his arms and resting her head against his chest, but then she hears the soft thud of his heart, and she knows there’s only one thing left that matters. “I love you,” she says, the words clear and steady and true, and she can hear the smile in his voice as he says it back: “And I dove you.”
“Shut up,” she says, but they’re both laughing a little bit now. When she tilts her head back, he kisses her for the last time, and all she can think is that this is another kind of first, something she hadn’t counted when she made her list: their first goodbye.
“Have a good trip,” he says as they pull apart again, and this—finally—is what tips her over the edge. She can’t help it: She begins to cry, swiping uselessly at the tears, but unable to stop, because it’s such an ordinary thing to say in a moment that feels so fantastically unreal.
But when it’s her turn, she can do no better. “I’ll miss you,” she tells him, holding on for a second more, though the car is puffing out clouds of exhaust, and the rain is coming down harder all around them, and the end of all this—the end of them—is finally here after all this time, rushing up to meet them like a freight train, noisy and unstoppable, the sound of it loud in her ears.
Aidan kisses her once more on the top of her head, and she clings to his hand for another few seconds before letting go. When she finally does, she can’t bear to look, or she’s certain she might never actually leave, and so instead, she squares her shoulders and breathes in and out, walking straight over to the car and climbing inside with her heart skidding around in her chest and the tears all mixed up with the rain on her face.
“You okay?” her mom asks, once she’s shut the door, but Clare has no idea how to answer that, because she is and she isn’t, because she’s stuck somewhere between the end and the beginning, and the only way to get unstuck, it seems, is to keep moving.
So she nods. “Let’s go,” she says as Bingo clambers onto her lap, his tail fanning the air. Her dad throws the car into gear, and they back out of the driveway with the dog looking out the rain-streaked window as they pass Aidan, because Clare can’t seem to bring herself to do it. But once they’re on the street, she changes her mind, struck by an urgent need to see him one more time, so she twists around in her seat, peering between the boxes piled in back.
He’s still there, of course, standing in the rain as he watches them go. It almost feels to Clare like she left a piece of her heart back there with him, the two halves being stretched between them like taffy. She lifts a hand, and he does the same, and they remain like that for what feels like a very long time, fixed in a slow-motion version of goodbye.
In another kind of story, Clare knows, this would be different. If this were a movie, she’d yell for her dad to stop the car, and then, amid the screech of the brakes and the squeal of the tires, she’d go hurtling out the door, running down the rain-soaked street, desperate to tell Aidan one last thing before she goes.
But the truth is there’s nothing more to say. Over the past twelve hours, they’ve spent all their words—generously, riotously, fully—like a couple of gamblers throwing down every last chip without a single thought for tomorrow.
And now, she knows, the only thing left for them to do is to go out and find some more stories to tell, to start a brand-new collection of adventures and memories, to keep them close like the best of all souvenirs, and then one day, if they’re really lucky, to find a way to bring them home again.
At the mail center, the man behind the counter scans Clare’s receipt before disappearing into the back room to retrieve the box. Behind her, the line is long, and everyone seems restless, but nobody more than Clare, who stands on her tiptoes, craning to see what it is that someone sent her.
It’s not that she never gets mail; when you go to school a couple of hours from the nearest major city, you end up doing most of your shopping online. But since starting here last fall, she can count on one hand the number of unexpected packages she’s received.
There were two from her mother back in September, not long after she first arrived: one filled with candy and photos, the other with a few things she’d accidentally left behind. And then a couple for her birthday in October, including one from Stella th
at contained an old dictionary with words like confidant and rapport and camaraderie carefully circled throughout. (Clare suspected they were more than just suggestions for enhancing her vocabulary.)
But that’s pretty much it.
So when the man finally returns with a square box, heaving it onto the counter, Clare has to keep herself from reaching for it while he checks her name off a form.
“Rocks?” he asks, raising his eyebrows as he scribbles something.
“Huh?”
“Someone sending you rocks?”
Clare shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Sure feels like it,” he says, pushing it over to her, and when she picks it up, she realizes that he’s right. It’s heavier than it looks, and she readjusts her grip, her fingers slipping beneath the weight of it.
She makes it all the way to the end of the crowded hallway before she allows herself to look at the return label, though by that point, she doesn’t need to. The moment she picked up the box, she knew exactly who it was from and what was inside.
Even so, it nearly takes her breath away when she sees Aidan’s familiar handwriting in the upper-left-hand corner of the box. Beside the return address, he’s crossed out the word FedEx with a thick black marker and written carrier pigeon instead.
She hasn’t heard a word from him in five months. Not since that first night back home over Thanksgiving.
And now, there’s this: a box appearing as if from nowhere, as if by magic.
Someone bumps her elbow, and she fumbles it a little, catching it with her knee. She realizes she’s still standing in the middle of the hallway, so she forces herself to walk up the stairs, weaving through dozens of students on the way to class—nodding here and there at the ones she knows—and cradling the box as if it were something fragile, though she’s already sure it’s not.
Outside the building, she hurries over to a bench, then sits with the package balanced on her lap, staring at the address. It takes a long time for her heart to slow down. Just the sight of Aidan’s name has sent her spinning, and she tips her head back to look up at the sky, trying to collect herself again.