100 Days (13 page)

“You are running,” Nan says simply, and Aiden finally feels the wet press of ink against his skin. “But not away, and this is most curious thing about you. I think you were running away, but now, no. Now you are running
to
.”

Aiden’s gaze slides to his periphery but he doesn’t dare look at Jake—not now, not when every look is loaded, like a powder keg packed to the brim and just waiting for the slightest spark to ignite it. They carry it between them as if it’s a tangible thing—slowly circling a flame—and Aiden is losing purchase all the while.

“This is not usual, not usual,” Nan says as she sits back, and Aiden realizes that the soft bristles of her paintbrush have ceased their movements against his skin. He takes in his three symbols: his past could almost be a basic Celtic knot; his present is something like the letter X, and his future… is the same as Jake’s. “I see
mpatapo
for past, which is peacemaking. You stopped fighting. This explain running. For present, you have
fawohodie;
this mean you are free. Yes?”

Aiden nods dumbly, struck by the accuracy of Nan’s insights.

“And your future, this not usual at all. This lead you same place as ‘just friend,’” she says, her downturned mouth twisting into something that could be a wry smile. “But for you,
eban
is sign of home and love as one.”

“Maybe there’s some cutie back in Brunswick waiting for you,” Jake mur­murs, nudging Aiden’s shoulder.

Nan shakes her head, gesturing emphatically to Aiden’s future symbol. “Home and love, see? They are same thing,” she declares. After a pause that feels too awkward, she sighs heavily and stands to reach one of the displays of small wooden tiles that hang around her stall. Both Jake and Aiden stand and watch as Nan retrieves two tiles bearing the
eban
symbol. She holds them between her palms, closes her eyes and says, “But you will
not
see, not yet. You keep your eyes closed and complicate things. So you take these, and work for them.”

Jake pulls out his wallet as Aiden takes their tiles, but Nan waves him off. “Come back and see Nan when your future is present,” she says, and for a mo­ment that wry smile is back and Aiden can’t quite figure out whether she just wants to see them again, or if she wants to be proved correct in her thinly-veiled predictions.

“Thank you,” Jake says, and half turns to leave before seeming to think better of it. Instead, he reaches up, unpins the antique brass brooch from his scarf and holds it out to her. “May I?”

Nan nods, her slightly raised eyebrows the only outward sign of her sur­prise, and Aiden watches as Jake fastens it in place over her heart. He tweaks it until it’s straight, and explains, “It’s a turtle, for longevity.”

“I have lived long time already.”

“And I hope you still have a long time left.”

“You should keep him,” Nan says to Aiden with a significant look.

“Thank you,” he says almost distractedly, too many thoughts turning over in his mind to form one coherent string.

“It was lovely to meet you,” Jake adds, and Nan inclines her head.

“You both run
to,
see what happens,” are her final words before she sits down again and puts away her brushes and ink.

When they are far enough away to be out of earshot, Jake whirls on Aiden with a bewildered look. “That was
insanely
weird, right? It wasn’t just me?”

“I don’t know. She seemed to have us figured out,” Aiden says with a shrug he doesn’t quite believe.

“The past and present stuff, maybe,” Jake concedes. “But the future stuff… I mean,
you
know I’m not really into relationships, and… and what was all that about you ‘running to’ something?”

“No idea,” Aiden says. He takes a deep breath and tries to shake Nan’s words and the weight of her gaze, but he can still feel it, lingering along with the words ringing in his ears.
Now you are running
to. When he looks back, however, all he sees is a soft smile as she runs her fingers around and around the turtle pin. “That was nice. What you did for her, with the brooch.”

“She wouldn’t let me pay her,” Jake says nonchalantly. “Even if she sells it, at least she didn’t completely waste her time.”

“It was still nice,” Aiden says, prodding him in the side until he smiles. The sun finally breaks through the thick bank of cloud that hangs heavily above them, and Aiden raises his hand to shield his eyes. “I’m starving. Wanna check out that café further up?”

“Actually, do you mind if we head back?” Jake asks. “I found a pasta recipe I’ve been dying to try. Plus, I need to catch up on a few emails, and since the park has Wi-Fi…”

Aiden grins and rolls his eyes fondly. “Lead the way.”

2,151 miles

Day Twenty-Five: South Carolina

“I won’t be long,” Jake says, cutting the engine and unclipping his seat belt. “Just wait here for me?”

“Where are we?” Aiden glances through the windshield at the other cars in the parking lot.

“Just something I need to see,” Jake mutters. He grabs his phone from the dashboard and repeats, “I won’t be long.”

“Jake, stop.” Aiden reaches across to take his arm. “Why are we here?”

Jake pauses, takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. Gently, he slips his arm out of Aiden’s grasp. Just before he opens the door and hops out of the cab, he says, “This is Mom’s alma mater.”

He walks quickly up Greene Street, following the directions he pulls up on his phone and hoping that Charlie hasn’t chosen today to check their pro­gress on the GPS. It’s a beautiful, sunny day, but Jake struggles to feel the warmth beating down upon him as he makes his way closer to the campus proper.

The two events that led to Jake cutting through downtown Columbia in­stead of heading straight to Sesquicentennial State Park were individually incon­sequential, a pair of fleeting reminders of the past he tries not to think too much about, stings to the heart and mind as ultimately temporary as rain­drops slowly rolling from roof tiles. Together in quick succession, however, they were another matter entirely.

It began with the Stevie Wonder song, cutting a swath through the radio static as they passed the state line. Stevie’s voice was as full of mirth and joy as it was when Jake sat at the kitchen table, still young enough that his feet didn’t quite reach the linoleum, watching his parents dance; and later, when he sat with his mom as she laughed with her hands on her heaving belly while Charlie tried to teach their dad proper turnout.

He had reached over to change the station but withdrawn at the last moment, letting in the wistful pain and feeling it instead of pushing it away. His grip on the steering wheel remained tight until his fingers ached.

Then, the first time they had passed a sign for the University of South Carolina bearing the legend,
Go Gamecocks!
Aiden said, “Oh my god. It’s too easy, right?”

“Way too easy,” Jake replied offhandedly, before doing a double take and craning around as they sped past. Another memory of his mom—shuffling around the house with a cold, the long sleeves of her USC sweatshirt hanging over her hands—rose to the forefront of his mind and left him short of breath. He remembered crawling up onto the couch beside her and tracing the letters on her sweatshirt with the tip of his index finger as a rerun of an old
American Bandstand
episode played in the background; he asked for a story, and she told him about the fountain where she first met his dad.

Dappled sunlight plays across the street, and Jake glances up at the blue sky through the trees and squares his shoulders; he can already hear that very fountain over passing cars and small groups of chattering students. As he leaves the cover of the trees and sunshine breaks over him once more, he wraps his arms around himself and crosses the terrace in long strides.

Standing at the edge of the fountain, he expects to feel a sense of closure or peace. It never comes. He has only memories of stories told to him, not memories of his own. This place means nothing to him anymore, even though one day many years ago it seemed like a magical promised land.

Exhaling deeply, he sits down on the edge of the low wall that borders the fountain and runs the tips of his fingers back and forth through the cool water, trying and failing to keep his mind blank.

“Excuse me,” comes a gruff voice from somewhere above him. Shielding his eyes against the sun’s glare, Jake sees a man who looks like a professor approach­ing retirement age. His hair and mustache are light gray fading into white, and he’s clad in a tweed jacket one would expect to see on any stereotypical movie professor. With a genial smile that reminds Jake of Grandpa Art, the gentleman gestures to the wall next to him. “Would you mind if I sit?”

“Of course not, please.”

“These old legs are certainly not what they used to be,” the man says in a mild South Carolina accent as he sits down. He regards Jake with appraising eyes. “You’re not a student here, are you?”

“What gave me away?”

“Ah, I’m just good with faces.” After a pause, the man holds out his hand. “John Goldman, professor of psychology.”

“Jake Valentine, nice to meet you.”

“So what are you doing here, Jake? Did you just come for the fountain?”

Jake rubs his palms up and down his thighs, buying himself a moment before he has to answer. It’s the same every time—the throb and stutter in his heart, the thickness in his throat—and he swallows convulsively. “My mom went to school here. Until I saw the road signs, I’d forgotten.”

“She couldn’t bring you herself to show you around?” John asks.

“She died when I was seven,” he says, steeling himself to give the same expla­nation his father recited by rote to every last person who had called their house in the weeks afterward. “She and my dad were on their way back from a Lamaze class one night, and they hit a patch of ice and spun out of control. Dad was fine, just a couple bruises, but there just… wasn’t anything they could do for her.”

“I’m so very sorry to hear that,” John says gravely. “And she was pregnant?”

“With my baby sister. There were… complications, and they couldn’t save them both so they tried to save Mom, but… her heart stopped, and they tried to do compressions but she had a—a punctured lung—”

“Jake,” John says, his hand a heavy and unexpected comfort on Jake’s shoulder.

Jake reaches up to wipe his eyes and finds them dry. He hasn’t cried since that night, after the light from the open doorway spilled out around his dad’s crumpling silhouette and the world as he knew it ended with only a handful of shattering words. “How could I have forgotten that this is where she went to school, where she met my dad?”

“It’s an easy detail to forget, given how young you were when she passed,” John says, ducking his head to catch Jake’s gaze. “You remember other things instead, I’m sure.”

“I try not to.” He blurts it before he can even think about it, and at the terrible truth of his own words he feels utterly ashamed—he spends even more time trying not to think about his father.
What does that make me?

John is silent, and with a huff of grim laughter Jake returns his gaze to the breeze-rippled surface of the water in the fountain, the wobbling outlines of pennies that have been tossed there with wishes to ace a final or get the girl or win the lottery.

After a long pause, John clears his throat and asks, “Jake, if I might ask… how old are you now?”

“I just turned twenty-two.”

“Don’t you think that’s an awfully long time to be carrying this pain around with you?”

“I don’t know what else to do with it,” Jake says, wondering why it’s so easy for him to unburden himself to perfect strangers and so ceaselessly difficult with someone he’s known since almost before he can remember. “But I think it’s… I’ve turned into someone I don’t want to be.”

“Do you have a penny?”

Jake meets John’s eyes with a quirked brow and, at his impassive expression, decides to humor him. He reaches into his pocket and draws out a quarter.

“Good, now stand up and face the water,” John instructs him brightly, contra­dicting his earlier words by practically jumping to his feet, and Jake wonders if the man already knew or was able to see something in him as he happened by. When Jake is standing, John gestures to the water. “Make a wish.”

“Do I get twenty-five?” he jokes, turning the quarter over and over between his fingers.

“No. But you do get a chance to do something that I think you probably don’t do all that often.”

“Which is?”

“Put a little faith in something. In yourself.”

Jake pauses at that. “Am I really that transparent?”

“More of a mirror, actually,” John replies mildly, but there is a sadness in his tone that lends weight to his words. “Whenever you’re ready, go ahead.”

“What do I wish for?”

“Whatever you most want for yourself.”

Jake looks out at the water, at the spray from the three jets set along the center of the fountain and the white wall bordering it, and lets his gaze slide up and away to the benches nestled in the shade of the crepe myrtle trees, whose branches hang heavily under the weight of their pink blossoms. He can almost picture his mother here, the incarnation of her that he never knew—a dress, leggings, slouch socks and Keds—handing off a stack of thick textbooks to his father and smiling, smiling, smiling.

I wish to be what he needs me to be,
Jake thinks, suddenly flashing on Aiden, that night in Philadelphia, splayed out underneath him and waiting for a kiss that Jake was unable to give. Aiden would need all of the person he chose to love, and Jake doesn’t know how to let someone have all of him when
no one
ever has. With the hope that he will learn, he flips the coin into the water where it disappears with a soft
plink.

“Now make it come true,” John says. He glances down at his watch and turns to face Jake squarely. “I’m afraid I have a class in ten minutes, so I should be on my way.”

Jake nods and wraps his arms around himself again, but suddenly feels as if he doesn’t need to hold himself together quite so tightly. It’s an alien sensation, and he doesn’t know how to process it.