Between Here and Forever (4 page)

ten

I see Claire’s car up ahead of me as I’m waiting
for the ferry, but don’t bother even trying to ride up to her. People take waiting for the ferry very seriously around here, and I don’t feel like getting yelled at for “cutting in line,” never mind that together, me and my bike make up about a quarter of a car. The ferry still counts us as one vehicle.

And makes me pay for it too.

So I wait, and after I’m ushered on board and everyone has parked and the ferry is finally chugging away from the dock, I go find Claire.

She’s standing up near the front of the boat, pushing her hair back off her face with one hand. Claire isn’t pretty, but she stands out. She has short hair, barely over her ears, and it’s bright red, almost orange. She used to wear it super short, practically a buzz cut. I was ten and Tess was thirteen when Claire first got it cut that way, and Tess thought it was the most amazing thing ever. She had a photo of the two of them down at the beach, the top of Claire’s head as sunburned as her nose, stuck in the frame of her dresser mirror for ages.

I wonder what she did with it when she decided she wasn’t speaking to Claire anymore. I never asked her. When Tess was eighteen and I was fifteen, I never spoke to her unless I had to.

“Hey,” I tell Claire, and plant myself next to her at the rail. The ferry pushes into a wave, and spray mists my face.

“Hey,” Claire says. “Heard you went to the gift shop today. I didn’t know you were interested in tapping that ass, Abby.”

“Tap that ass? What year is it?”

“Rick used to say it,” she says, a tiny smile appearing but fading fast, as soon as she’s said Rick’s name. “Well, he said it about me. ‘I tapped that ass!’ Do you know he actually called me last night and said he didn’t see how Cole could possibly need money since he’s ‘you know, a little kid, and what do they need?’”

“Sorry,” I tell her. “So I guess you told him you wanted to get back together, right?”

“Oh yeah,” she says, grinning at me. “You know what the best part was? After I hung up on him, he actually called back and asked again because he thought he got cut off. I don’t know what I was thinking back in high school.”

“No offense, but what were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t,” she says. “He wanted to have sex, and I thought it seemed so much easier than being in love …” She trails off.

“Wait, you were in love with someone? Who?”

She blinks at me, and then looks out at the water.

“Someone who didn’t love me back,” she finally says. “Not enough, anyway.”

“Are they still in town? Never mind, of course they are. Who is it? Did Tess know? Is that why she got so mad when you—?”

“Nice try,” Claire says. “But I haven’t forgotten you were in the gift shop talking to the guy who’s so good-looking someone who came into the hospital actually stopped and took his picture.”

“Did not!”

“Did,” she says. “One of the nurses saw the whole thing.”

“That’s just sad.”

“He is awfully—I was going to say cute, but he’s not cute. He’s beautiful. Like, really and truly beautiful. Don’t you think?”

“I think he’s going to wake Tess up.”

“What?”

I tell Claire my plan.

“So because you think that you saw Tess’s eyes move—?”

“It sounds stupid when you say it like that,” I say. “She … look, you were in the room. He talked, and something happened to her.”

“Because of Eli?”

“Yes, duh,” I say. “You’ve seen him. You even said he was beautiful just now. And you know how Tess is. She’s always wanted to be swept off her feet by the perfect guy. Beth even got her a book of ‘classic romantic fairy tales’ for Christmas.” I swallow. “Or at least that’s what Tess said. She didn’t … she didn’t ever show us her gifts. She left them at school and now—”

“How is Beth?” Claire says. “I haven’t seen her at the hospital much lately.”

“She came a lot at first,” I say. “But now she’s … I don’t know. Busy with school, I guess.”

“They lived together for two years.”

“Yeah, but that’s how it is in college. Tess says that when you find someone decent to room with, you don’t mess with that.”

Claire stares down at the river. “You know, Abby, maybe you don’t—maybe you don’t know Tess like you think you do.”

“Oh, come on,” I tell her. “Tess wants to be happy.”

“No, she wants everyone to think she’s perfect.”

“I don’t think Tess ever worried about that. Why would she ever have needed to? I mean, she’s—”

“Yeah,” Claire says. “She’s Tess. But still, she could never bring herself to do anything she thought someone, somewhere, might possibly think was wrong.”

“You know, Mom used to say Tess wanted things to be perfect,” I say. “Do you think that’s why she acted the way she did when you got pregnant? Not that I think you getting pregnant was bad or anything, but Tess—”

“I know,” Claire says, her voice bitter. “Believe me, I know what Tess thought.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, I know you did too. You never told her about Jack after all, did you?”

I shake my head and force myself to laugh. It comes out rough, broken-sounding. “No, I didn’t. She wouldn’t—she wouldn’t have understood. I mean, look at how she treated you. And she liked you. Me and Tess just aren’t—we’re nothing alike.”

“I think … I think that you two aren’t as different as you think. I mean, look at this plan of yours. You’re expecting a happy ending, aren’t you?”

“Because I know Tess does,” I say. “Because she believes in them. I don’t.”

“Abby,” Claire says, but I shake my head again, as if I can shake off the pity in her voice.

“Don’t. Just … don’t. I know Tess was mean to you and she—I didn’t always like her, but she’s my sister. I’m supposed to want her to—”

“Supposed?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It’s what you said.”

“I have to go,” I say, and head back to my bike. I stare out at the water, at the Ferrisville dock growing closer and closer.

I don’t want Claire feeling sorry for me. I don’t want her saying that she knows I used to believe in love and all that crap. I don’t want to be reminded that I used to think it was possible for a guy around here, around Tess, to look at me and not see her.

I don’t want to think that once I was stupid enough to believe I could be with someone who wanted my sister and make them want me.

eleven

My parents get home earlier than usual and catch
me in the kitchen poking pieces of toast into the jelly jar and then eating them.

“You’re supposed to put jelly on bread, not put the bread in the jar. And you did eat something else besides that, right?” Mom says, and sits down across from me, giving me her Mom stare. She’s really good at it.

“Why are you home early? Is Tess—?”

“She’s fine. Your father and I—we decided to come home after we talked to the doctor.”

I look around for Dad, but he’s come in and gone straight into the living room. Something’s definitely happened. “What did the doctor say?”

Mom gets up. “I’m going to make a sandwich. Do you want one?”

“Mom,” I say, and she looks over her shoulder at me from the counter and gives me a small, sad half smile.

“It’s nothing you need to worry about. We just … the insurance isn’t going to cover as much as we thought and—well, Tess’s been in the hospital for long enough that we’re being asked to consider other options.”

“Other options? Like what?” I know for a fact that Mom and Dad have read everything they could get their hands on about comas. I also know that they’ve gone to see a bunch of other doctors, and always come back from those meetings grim-faced.

Mom doesn’t answer.

“Mom?” I say again, and Dad comes in from the living room, his mouth curved up in this weirdly familiar smile that, for some reason, sends a shiver racing through me, a flash bolt of panic-fear under my skin.

“I bet you have homework,” he says.

“Yeah,” I tell him, getting up and turning away so I can’t see his face and that smile. “I do.”

It’s silent, so silent, as I walk up to my room and shut the door, but as I creep out of it and back toward the stairs—I shut my door before I went through it because I knew what was coming—I hear my parents start to talk.

“I hate the idea of Tess going to a home,” Dad says. “She’s not—there’s still a chance. She could still wake up. And I don’t want her to think—”

“She knows you love her,” Mom says. “She knows you won’t give up on her. We all know that.”

“Katie—” Dad says, and Mom cuts him off, says, “Dave, I just—I’m not you, all right?”

Silence falls again, and then I hear Mom sigh, hear her cross the room.

“I wish—” she says, love and sadness in her voice, and Dad says, “Me too,” his voice smothered-sounding, like he’s speaking from somewhere far away, or holding something back.

Like he’s trying not to cry.

I creep down the stairs a little more, and when I crane my head toward the kitchen I see them holding each other, Dad resting his head against Mom’s, mouth pressed to her hair.

The smile he was wearing before is gone, wiped clean, and I realize where I’ve seen it before.

Tess. Her senior year, and especially before graduation, before she left for college, that was how Tess usually smiled. I just—I never realized it was strained. That it wasn’t real at all.

My skin prickles even though it isn’t cold, and I’m chilled to the bone.

I move silently back up the stairs, head into my room, and close the door behind me.

twelve

Until I was fifteen, I wanted to be Tess. I wanted
her straight, shiny hair. I wanted her ability to always look perfect. I wanted her smile to be mine, I wanted people to see me and have their eyes light up.

I wanted all of those things, and never got any of them.

Tess was kind about it, though. It was her way. She would loan me her clothes, and not tell me to go away when I saw her with her friends. And when guys came to see her—and they always came to see her—she’d introduce me to them.

People in Ferrisville see Tess, even think “Tess,” and they think “perfect.” And she was perfect.

At least, she was in public.

At home though, sometimes, Tess would—well, she had a streak of darkness in her. Sounds normal actually, I think, but the thing is, she never showed it outside the house, never took it anywhere that people could see. Not ever.

It wasn’t anything big at first. She’d get upset over something and just retreat, fall silent and go into her room, act like she’d vanished even though she hadn’t. And then, if someone called or came by, she’d … I don’t even know how to explain it right. It’s like she’d smooth something over herself, push it away, maybe, and she’d be Tess again. The Tess everyone knew, the one who was always so happy, who always showed a smiling face to the world.

But that was for the world. For me … well, I remember this one time, when I was twelve and she was fifteen, I went into her room without knocking, hoping she’d let me sit with her and Claire, and she just stared at me like she’d never seen me before.

“Hey,” I said, and then she’d smiled, a too-bright and too-sharp curve of her mouth, like she’d forgotten how to smile and couldn’t even fake it, and got up, came over to me, and said, “Get out.”

She didn’t yell. She spoke in this weird, flat voice, almost like speaking hurt her, and when I said, “But—” and Claire said, “Tess, relax, okay?” Tess swung around and looked at Claire. Just looked at her, didn’t say a word, and Claire looked away from me, looked at the floor.

I took a step back, and Tess shut the door again, still looking at Claire and never once at me. It was like she’d forgotten I was even there.

That night, at dinner, I asked Tess something—what she was going to wear to school the next day, maybe, or about her hair, things I knew Tess loved talking about—and she ignored me.

“I think Abby asked you a question,” Dad said, and gave Tess a playful nudge with the bowl of salad he was holding.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Tess said, and again, she didn’t shout. She didn’t even sound angry. She just sounded … gone. She got up and went to her room and wouldn’t come out for two days. She didn’t go to school, didn’t take calls other than to tell people she wasn’t feeling well but that she was so glad they called. She was “asleep” if anyone came by. She didn’t eat, and I don’t actually think she even slept at all. She just did … she just did nothing.

Mom stayed home from work the second day, and when I got home from school Tess was out of her room and smiling again. When I asked her if she was okay, she looked at me like I’d asked her a question she didn’t understand and then said, “Mom says you have her mother’s eyes.”

“Oh,” I said, hurt because Mom never talked about her parents with me, not ever. I knew they were both dead, but that was it. I hadn’t even known my eyes looked like my grandmother’s.

“Yeah,” Tess said. “Did you know she killed herself?”

“What?”

“She did,” Tess said. “So maybe you’re haunted.” She leaned in toward me. “Maybe you’ll end up just like her.”

Normally this is where I’d have hollered for Mom or Dad or both of them, but I couldn’t. Tess was just—she looked so normal, so Tess-like, but what she was saying—it scared the crap out of me. I didn’t want to be haunted.

I didn’t want Tess to sound so happy about it.

So I just stood there, staring and scared, until she walked away.

When I finally worked up the nerve to ask Mom about my eyes, she said that yes, they did look like her mother’s, and then, “Why do you ask?”

I shrugged.

“You’re not like her, though,” Mom said, leaning over and smoothing my hair away from my face. “You’re like your father. When he decided to be who he really was, when he stood up for himself, he—well, let’s just say you can tell he’s your dad.”

I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but didn’t ask. I figured it had something to do with Dad’s brother, John, who’d died when Dad was in high school, and how Dad had left home for a while afterward. Mostly—after hearing that and what Tess had told me—I decided my parents hardly ever talked about their pasts and their families for a reason.

I still wanted to be Tess, though. I wanted to be able to make people smile like she did, wanted to always know what to say or what to wear. I wanted to have that mysterious something she had, I wanted her ability to make everyone who met her turn to her, like her. I suppose I could have told someone about Tess’s moments of darkness, the ones that only happened at home, in private, but my parents never talked about it to anyone and I—well, everyone would have said I was jealous. Younger sisters who aren’t as pretty and perfect as their older sisters always are, right?

And the truth is, I was. Those few moments at home aside, Tess was everything you could ever want to be.

Then Claire got pregnant right after the start of her and Tess’s senior year and Tess … she changed. Not on the surface, not in the glossy self she dressed up every day and that she let everyone see. But at home, in private, she was different. She was silent. She was angry. She was careful to never show it except at home, but at home, being around her was like—it was like being around someone who was so angry they were sick with it.

And I didn’t want to be like her anymore.

Sometimes, especially as Claire’s pregnancy really started to show and Tess was waiting to hear about college, she’d just lie on her bed and stare at the ceiling. And not just for a little while. For hours.

And once, we ran into Claire and her mother at the grocery store when Mom sent us to get hamburger buns. Tess acted like she didn’t see them, but the whole car ride home, all she talked about was how much she hated Claire. She spoke so much and so fast spit flew out of her mouth, dangled from the corner of her lips, and when she ran her hands through her hair, she did it so hard that thick strands of it were wrapped around her fingers when she lifted them away.

That wasn’t the worst moment, though. Not for me.

The worst was the summer night I came home after I broke my own heart—and how stupid I’d been back then, at fifteen, to not see that you could do that, to not see that you could destroy yourself more thoroughly than anyone else could—and found Tess sitting in the living room.

She was sitting there, eighteen and golden, and she smiled at me, a real smile, a beautiful, heart-stopping Tess smile, and then said, “Abby? Are you—is something wrong?” her smile fading like she understood how I felt.

“Nothing,” I said, wanting to destroy her, the world, everything. As if Tess could ever understand how I felt. As if anything truly bad had ever happened to her.

“Okay,” she said slowly, clearly not buying it, and then moved her feet from the sofa to the floor, making space for me. “Want to watch a movie about aliens trying to destroy the world?”

I looked at the television screen. “You’re watching that stupid ‘modern’ version of Cinderella starring the actress whose head weighs more than her whole body for the ten millionth time.”

“I know,” she said. “But I can change the channel. And hey, you can laugh at me when I get scared.”

“I don’t want—”

“I know how you feel,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me, but just—I really do know, okay?”

I didn’t believe her—I’d spent my whole life watching her break hearts, not getting hers broken, after all, but she sounded so sincere. That was another thing about Tess. She had this way of making everything and anything sound true, sound like she knew what you meant, that she understood you.

She had a way of making you feel like she needed to be there for you. Like she wanted to. And that night, I needed to believe that someone was there for me.

Even if it was her.

And so I sat next to her, and we watched a movie where people got eaten by aliens. Tess hid her face behind her hands for most of it and never once said a word about the sand on my clothes or how the mascara she’d seen me put on before she left for work had washed into muddy smears under my eyes. She was so nice, so understanding—so Tess. And I hated her for it. For being so perfect yet again.

When I went to bed that night, I lay there, dry-eyed because I wasn’t going to cry. I wouldn’t let myself, and wondered if Tess would ever know what heartbreak was.

If she would ever know anything unpleasant, and how much I wished that she would.

And now she does.

I know I didn’t cause the accident, I know I’m not why Tess’s in the hospital. But now I wish I could take all the anger I’ve ever felt when I looked at Tess, when I thought about her, and make it disappear.

I wish a part of me doesn’t still feel that anger when I look at her lying silent and far away. I wish I wanted her to wake up only because I miss her.

But I don’t. I miss her, but not like I should. I … I want her to wake up so I don’t have to be tied to her forever.

I want her to wake up so I won’t forever be reminded that I’m not her.

That I’ll never be her.