“Helpless, useless, clueless. And old. Don’t forget old.”
“He said I didn’t need to save him.”
“But you want to.”
“Yeah. But I can’t. Right?”
“Probably not. Usually not.”
I called Ethan that night. He answered, and I could tell he was out somewhere and not at home. “Are you driving?” I asked. “I can call later.”
“It’s okay. Gil’s driving.”
“Oh. Where’re you guys going?”
“I don’t know. Just cruising up State Street now . . .”
I could hear laughter, people talking, a car radio. “Just you and Gil?”
“Um, Katy is here, too. And Jill.” Jill Stevenson, from the play. So, Ethan, Gil, Katy, and Jill. A perfect boy-girl ratio. “We’re just —”
“Jenna?” It was Katy. She must have grabbed the phone. “We were going to call you but Ethan said you had family stuff and anyway you were gone after rehearsal. Freshman Dave said you made him stage manager? What the hell?”
“I don’t have time. I’m going to flunk trig.”
There was a thumping sound, and a screech of laughter. Then Ethan was back on the line, breathless. “Sorry. Katy totally dropped the phone. Klutz!”
“I better go,” I said, trying very hard to keep my voice even.
“I’ll call you when I get home.”
“Ethan . . . Let’s talk Monday, okay? Give me the weekend off.”
There was a long pause. The background noise got quieter. “If you want.”
“I do.”
“Well. Bye.”
I started to say bye but he’d already hung up.
CHAPTER 23
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, MOM AND I WERE PLAYING SCRABBLE at the kitchen table since I had actually, for once, finished my homework by Saturday night. She was asking me about Ethan and why I hadn’t been out over the weekend. My habit was to not tell her anything of any significance, but we were attempting to forge new waters. Ever since I’d told her about what had happened with Cameron’s dad, she’d given me a lot of long looks but hadn’t said much. I knew she felt guilty — for not being there, for not having even a clue that something that horrifying had happened to me. It made her act differently around me. Quieter, but also solicitous and available. Like she had to win me back.
To show that I wanted things to be different, too, I actually told her the truth.
“I think maybe Ethan and I broke up,” I said, arranging my Scrabble tiles in front of me: YELP. LEAP. FLAY. FLEA.
Her face fell. “What happened?”
“I’m not sure, actually.” I placed my word across one of hers: FLAYED. “We might not be broken up. I think it’s up to me, and I have to decide.”
“Well.” She looked down at her letters. “Does all this have anything to do with Cameron coming back?”
“Basically.”
She didn’t put any letters down. Our game had effectively stopped. “I know you might think you want to be with Cameron that way,” she said, “but remember it’s been such a short time that he’s been back, and —”
“It’s not that.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t picture us together, like a couple. It’s more like . . .”
“Like a brother?”
“Mom, could you just listen?” She clamped her lips shut. “Not like a brother,” I said. “It’s almost like nothing would be enough. Being a couple wouldn’t be enough. Being like brother and sister wouldn’t be enough. It’s an endless sense of . . . I don’t know.” I could tell it was killing her to not talk. I sighed. “Go ahead.”
“Unfinished business,” she said, with a rush of breath. “That’s what I see between you two.”
“Unfinished business?”
“Yes. And I think it will feel that way until the day you die.”
I looked at her to see if she was serious. She was. “Great.”
The doorbell rang during dinner. Alan got up to answer, saying, “If it’s the missionaries I might let them in. I’m too tired to put up a fight.”
It wasn’t missionaries. It was Cameron.
He and Alan walked into the kitchen together. “He’s sick,” Alan said.
“Hi,” he said weakly, meeting my eyes for the briefest second.
“What is it?” Mom asked, getting up and shifting into nurse mode. “Did you walk here? Sit down. Tell me what you’re feeling.”
“Throat aches. Head aches. Everything aches.”
He sank into a chair at the table. Mom put her hand to his forehead. “You’ve definitely got a fever. When did this start?”
“My cold got better, but it kind of turned into this last night. I thought I’d feel better this morning but I feel worse. Didn’t know where to go.”
“You know you’re welcome here,” Mom said. She looked to me, then Alan. “Right?”
“Right,” I said. Alan nodded.
She turned her focus back to Cameron. “Have you eaten anything today?”
He shook his head.
“Jenna will fix you a plate while I set you up on the couch.”
“How about the sofa bed in my study?” Alan asked. “It should be warmer in there.”
“Good idea. Come on.” She helped Cameron up and led him out of the kitchen.
Alan got a plate out of the cupboard and handed it to me. “Is this okay with you, Jenna? For him to stay here?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s good. You have no idea what it takes for him to ask for help.”
I spent all evening in Alan’s office, reading at his desk and keeping Cameron company. Mostly he slept, snoring lightly and once in a while murmuring unintelligible somethings into his pillow. I turned my chair so that I could look at him whenever I wanted, at his face or at the bare foot that stuck out from under the covers, or at his arm dangling off the side of the sofa bed.
Around eleven, when I was ready for bed, Cameron woke up. I brought him broth and crackers. “Hi,” I said.
“Have you been here all this time?”
“Most of it.”
Alan’s beige pajamas looked small and uncomfortable on Cameron. “You don’t have to,” he said. “I can take care of myself.” He reached for the broth. I watched him slurp straight from his bowl, everything about him becoming younger and more boyish by the second — rosy lips on the white rim of the bowl, wrists without enough pajama sleeve to cover them, cowlick hair and sleepy eyes.
“I know you can. But you don’t have to.”
“Well . . .” He finally looked at me. “Thanks.”
Monday was the day of reckoning for me and Ethan. I knew we were breaking up, I just hadn’t figured out how exactly to do it, no plan for what to say. He, apparently, had a very clear plan. He was waiting by my locker, a smile on his face, expecting a hug. Which I gave him, out of habit.
“J.V., I missed you,” he said. “Your break is officially over, okay? I didn’t like it. I’m sorry for what I said about you being a moody bitch. I’m sorry I volunteered you for stage manager without asking. Sorry for being a jerk and everything. Don’t be mad at me anymore. I hate it.”
What about going out Friday without me? With Jill instead? I thought it but didn’t ask. The school hallway was not the right place for the conversation we needed to have. “So Freshman Dave is going to stage manage,” I said. “That’s okay?”
“Yep. And you are going to pass trig.”
“Promise?”
“There are no guarantees in life, Jenna.”
I tried to laugh. “If you only knew how true that is.”
The discussion at lunch centered on the Halloween party. Steph had big plans. “We’re going to trick-or-treat,” she said. “I don’t care how old we are. We are going to exploit the free candy situation to its maximum potential because it might be our last chance, ever.”
Katy groaned. “Really? Trick-or-treating? I heard it might snow.”
“So?” She’d already gotten half a d
ozen horror movies from the video store, laid in a supply of junk food, and, she now said in a dramatic stage whisper, “Booze.”
Gil rolled his eyes. “This is Jones Hall, not East High. We don’t drink. We never have before. Why start now?”
“Well, that’s the point,” Ethan said. “There are no dances at Jones. No real sports — sorry, Katy, I don’t count tennis. We should experience something authentically teenagery while we’re still actual teenagers.”
“Jenna?” Steph asked. “Opinion?”
My opinion was that Ethan’s rationale was lame. What I said: “If I got caught my parents would literally kill me, so I won’t be drinking. But as long as there is no drunk driving or drunk sex or drunk fights, I don’t really care what anyone else does.”
“Will Cameron drink?” Katy asked. “Where is he, anyway?”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“Does that dude ever come to school?” Gil asked. “He’s in some of my classes, or so I’ve heard.”
“He’s pretty smart,” I said. “Maybe he’s bored with class.”
“We’re all bored with class. All I know is, if it were me? My mom would be all over my butt if I missed ten minutes of school.”
“Not everyone has a mother.”
Katy laughed, thinking I was making a joke. “Jenna, you’re so funny.”
My mom and Cameron were sitting at the kitchen table when I got home, playing a game of backgammon. There was a plate on the table with half of what looked like a homemade cookie left, and milk-filmed glasses. Some sort of soup or stew simmered on the stove.
“Oh, there you are,” Mom said.
Cameron lifted a couple of fingers. “Hi.”
“What are you doing home?” I asked my mom.
“Well, I got to work and we were a tiny bit overstaffed on the floor, so I asked if I could come home at noon.” She smiled, radiant and maternal and beaming the kind of pride moms get when they bake cookies and make homemade soup. “I thought Cameron might like some company.”
I honestly could not remember one time when my mom took off work or missed class or came home early to take care of me, other than the day I fainted at school, the day I thought Cameron died. If I had a cold, she’d leave a box of cold medicine and some cans of chicken noodle on the counter and remind me to get plenty of fluids. The few times I was sicker than that, she paid the babysitter for extra hours.
“That’s nice,” I said.
Mom picked up the leftover half cookie and ate it. “Dinner might be later than usual,” she said. “I think we spoiled our appetites.”
“I’m starving.”
“Oh,” she said distractedly, studying the backgammon board. “You can fix yourself a snack, hm?” Cameron rolled his dice; Mom grimaced. “That’s your third doubles in a row. It’s hardly fair.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ll just fix myself a snack.” I found a package of Fig Newtons and took it to my room with what was left of the milk. I ate four, five, and half of a sixth, then stopped. If I kept going, which I could have easily done, I’d spend the rest of the night feeling sick and then be cranky and emotional in the morning, again, and what was it really giving me, all this eating? Tight clothes was what. What did I want? What did I really want?
I called Ethan, ready to break the news. “How was rehearsal?” I asked.
“Better.”
“We should probably talk.”
“I won’t drink at the party,” he said quickly. “If you don’t want me to, I won’t. I swear it right now. My hand is on a stack of Bibles.”
I paused. “That’s very chivalrous.”
“Chivalrous would be my middle name, if I could spell it.”
“Ethan . . .”
“Jenna?”
It was hard to break up with someone who never let you get around to it. “My mom is calling me,” I lied. “I’ll talk to you later.”
Cameron was quiet at dinner, when we finally ate. He looked and sounded a lot healthier than he had the night before but kept his head down and only answered direct questions. “Are you coming back to school tomorrow?” I asked.
“Probably.”
“That’s a good start,” Alan said, biting into his corn bread, sending a cascade of yellow crumbs down the front of his blue shirt. “Then what’s your plan?”
Mom looked pointedly at Alan. “Not that there’s any pressure for him to have a plan.”
Alan opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and picked up his wine and sort of raised his eyebrows. I smashed a piece of tomato against the side of my bowl. “You can’t live in the prop room until graduation,” I said.
“I won’t be here that long,” Cameron said, avoiding my eyes. “I’m going back to California.”
“What?” Mom looked from Cameron to Alan to me and back to Cameron. “Cam, honey, think about this. You should graduate. We’ll work something out. Maybe you’ll get a job and find another place. The cost of living here is so much lower than in California.”
I stared at Cameron but he still wouldn’t look at me. “I need to be closer to my brothers and sisters,” he said.
My mind had stopped at “going back to California.” He’d just gotten here. I’d just started to understand him, us, a tiny bit.
“. . . think about the good you can do them if you have a diploma,” Mom was saying. “Jones Hall is such a good school for you.”
“I want to see if I can file for custody, maybe,” Cameron said. “I need to get back to them.”
“All the more reason to finish school. It will give you a much stronger case.”
“Mom,” I said. “He doesn’t want to stay. He wants to go back.” Not that I was happy about it, but I knew there wasn’t much point in trying to talk him out of something he really wanted to do. The boy had determination. He had determined that he’d come to Utah and find me, and now he’d determined it was time to leave.
“I’m just saying that he should really think it through. . . .” She was near tears. Alan reached over and patted her hand. “Honey,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”
I glanced at Cameron. He looked down at his food. We all sat like that a long time.
I woke in the night. The chill in my room, the quiet, the eerie light coming through the window — it all said snow. I got up and pulled on an extra sweatshirt, moving down the hall toward Alan’s study. The door was ajar a couple of inches; I pushed it open. “Cameron? Cam?”
“I’m awake.”
“Get up,” I whispered. “I want to show you something.”
His silhouette rose and came to me.
“Put on your coat and shoes.”
He did.
I took his hand and led him back down the hall, past the humming fish tank, through the living room and out the front door. We stepped into the still, cold air. The street and sidewalk, the roof of every house, every car, the power lines, every tiny branch of every tree, had been covered by a neat layer of sparkling snow.
Quiet. Quiet. Nothing untouched by the white. The world and everything in it had changed overnight.
“I haven’t seen anything like this since I left Utah,” Cameron said.
“Remember that time at my apartment? You raised that blind like you were showing me the eighth wonder of the world.”
“I was.”
“Usually by the time I wake up, the plows and snowblowers have ruined everything.” The muffling effect of the snow made our voices intimate. “Don’t worry about my mom,” I said. “I think she’s trying to make up for other things, you know? If she can take care of you maybe she won’t feel so guilty about not being there more when I was growing up.”
He stared out into the street. We were still holding hands. His was much bigger than mine, bigger than Ethan’s. I felt completely enveloped in it.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “I had this doll. A baby doll. Stole it from the play area in kindergarten class.”
“Really? You stole it?”
“Yeah.
I kept it hidden in this old suitcase in a closet. Not my closet. If my dad found it I wanted it to just look like something someone had forgotten a long time ago.”
I let my other hand hover over the snow on the porch railing, tempted to leave my handprint then deciding not to.
“I would take the baby out,” Cameron continued, “when my dad wasn’t home. There was a rocking chair by the living room window. I’d take the baby and rock it. This one time, it was just like this outside. I opened the window because I liked to feel the cold air. Wrapped the baby in a towel, as if it was a blanket.”
“You didn’t want the baby to get cold.”
He smiled. “Right. And I sat in that chair and rocked it and rocked it while I watched the snow.”
I sighed, my breath making a white cloud. This was a memory I wanted to keep, whole, and recall again and again. When I was fifty years old I wanted to remember this moment on the porch, holding hands with Cameron while he shared himself with me. I didn’t want it to be something on the fringes of my memory like so many other things about Cameron and myself.
“When do you think you’re leaving?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Probably soon. Got what I came here for.”
“Even though we didn’t go back to your old house?”
“That was only part of it,” he said. “Not the main thing.”
A few more big flakes of snow drifted down from the starlit sky. “And what was the main thing?”
“This,” he said. “Right here.”
CHAPTER 24
CAMERON RODE WITH ME TO SCHOOL AND WE STOPPED FOR donuts and coffee, watching the snow come down in fat flakes. He told me about his siblings, showing me pictures. “Jake is the oldest,” he said. “Fourteen and already taller than my dad. He’s keeping things together, making sure the rest of them are okay.” He leaned forward and pointed. “This is Ryan. He’s eleven. Lizzie is eight; Brandon just turned five.”