Proof of Forever (25 page)

As the words spill out, she feels herself spinning closer and closer to the dark center of the whirlpool, the answer to the mystery she could sense was there all along, staring at her like a black pupil. The secret. The truth.

Joan is squatting down to their level, one hand on Tali's shoulder and one on Luce's. Zoe is curled up with her arms around her knees. “Joy didn't tell you?” Joan asks Luce, then looks to Zoe, then Tali. “Oh, honey . . . girls . . .” Joan shakes her head, tears still trickling down her face. She wipes them with the back of her hand.

“What is it, Mrs. Freeman?” Luce asks, her voice shaking.

And then in a hoarse voice, Zoe says, “You have to let us know. Whatever it is.”

Joan just shakes her head again, unable to speak. Allen steps in
next to her, helping her to stand. “Joy is very sick,” he tells them. His voice, by contrast, is steady and even, filling Tali with sudden rage. “She's been fighting it for the last couple of years, but she's . . . she's no longer winning the fight. She wanted to come so badly tonight. I think she wanted to see you all. She missed you so much.”

And then Tali is stumbling through the rec hall doors after them. Mr. Wilkinson is there, holding the girls back, as Joy's parents are getting into their car, slamming the doors with finality, following behind the ambulance as it wails away into the night, and Tali is somehow inside the ambulance and not, standing there on the lawn unable to feel her own hands or her feet, simply watching, helpless, as the ambulance lights flicker behind the trees, before the vehicles turn a bend and are gone.

There are certain moments in life that no SAT word can describe. There's no thesaurus in any language that can find the right adjective for how Luce feels as she walks into her house late that night, closely followed by Andrew, her mom, and her twin brothers. Her mom heads inside first, to tuck in the younger kids. Luce sees her father's car in the driveway and, for a second, wishes he was working late tonight, like he does so often. There's a lot she doesn't understand about her parents' marriage, or her perfectly organized and polished family, she realizes.

Then again, there's a lot she didn't know about Joy, either—like the horrible secret she kept from all of them for the past two years. Even as it sickens Luce to think about it, it makes a disturbing kind of sense. The way she vanished so abruptly, refusing to talk or let them visit. The heaviness Luce felt in the air earlier that night, when they first arrived back at camp and saw Joy, so thin and so frail, leaning against the wall, waiting for them. The
gravel in her voice when she told them she'd come to say good-bye.

Good-bye to all of it,
she'd said.

“Are you okay?” Andrew asks, putting an arm around Luce.

She shakes her head. Of course she isn't okay. Upstairs, her room will be sitting there just like she left it, filled with boxes packed to the brim with stuff she's supposed to bring to Prince-ton. But this terrifies her. How can she move forward, knowing what she knows now?

“Do you mind if I talk to my mom alone for a minute?” she asks.

“Of course not,” he replies, taking a seat at the kitchen island.

“I'll be right back,” she says, heading up the stairs to the study, where her mom has plopped down her bag.

Luce enters the room and quietly closes the door behind them. “I need to talk to you,” she says.

Her mom looks up, pushing some of her curly dark hair back from her face and retucking it into her bun. She looks tired and overheated, but pretty—her features delicate and refined. “Sweetie, you must be in so much shock,” she says, sinking into her leather chair, then bending down to rifle through a drawer.

For a minute, Luce isn't sure whether she's referring to what happened with Joy, or what happened in the past, with Mr. Wilkinson. It occurs to her that while she's been carrying around the burden of this knowledge, her mom probably has no idea that she knows.

It became clear to Luce as soon as they returned to the present
that her trip back in time must have been imagined—an extended, if incredibly vivid, hallucination. There was simply no other way to explain it logically, and she knew from the moment she spoke to Andrew that he hadn't experienced it, hadn't remembered anything of their game of Strip Twenty Questions or their rooftop picnic or their attempts to ensnare her mother.

Which made her wonder—did her mom's affair really happen? If it did, was it simply that Luce hadn't noticed the first time around? Did her weird flashback somehow reveal an unconscious suspicion?

She needs answers. That much is clear.

“I am,” she says now. “I am in shock. But I need to know something from you. Did you ever—”

Before she can finish her question, she hears a sniffle. It takes her so much by surprise that she can't complete her sentence. Her mother looks up and wipes her eyes.

Her mom.

Bernadette Cruz.

The woman who says crying is a waste of time, who says
achievers don't have regrets
.

Luce is frozen. “Mom?”

Her mother shakes her head. “Can you get your father, please?” Another tear slides down her face.

Luce is so frightened by the sight of it, all she can do is obey, the demands of her planned confrontation instantly forgotten. She hurries to her parents' bedroom, where her father is stepping into his slippers, his straight dark hair matted funnily over his
balding head. He's got on his striped pajamas. “Luce?” he says, scratching his head at her sleepily. “How was reunion night?”

She practically chokes. He doesn't know about any of it. But she's in too much shock to say so. She simply shakes her head. “Mom, um, needs you. In the study” is all she can say. Her mind's a blank.

He looks at her like she's grown a third ear but trudges into the hallway and over to the study, Luce following a few feet behind him.

She peers around the bend of the doorway after he enters the room, and she hears him saying, “What is this?” His voice drops an octave to a tone she's rarely heard from him before, except when he's taking care of Amelia. Then her father wraps her mother in his arms. He turns back to face Luce. “Luce, honey. Can you close the door, please?”

And so she does.

She stumbles back down the stairs in a haze.

“Let's get some air,” she says to Andrew, who is typing into his phone on the counter in the kitchen. She leads the way through the house to the sliding door facing the backyard. As she slides it open, the automatic porch light illuminates the remains of the picnic Luce set up earlier, rose petals still strewn across the iron garden bench and stone patio floor, wilting slightly. It would be funny if it weren't so awful—her aborted plan to lose her virginity to Andrew seems so stupid now. Just another attempt to control her life, to control the future. On some level, she knows she wanted to sleep with Andrew so he wouldn't break up with her. How pathetic it sounds to her now.

Besides, the problem was never that he might leave her. He loves her. He always has.

They sit down on the bench and he moves to put his arm around her again. After a moment of hesitation, she leans into him, unable to shake the image of her mother leaning into her father. Her mother crying.

“It's going to be okay, whatever happens,” he says, sounding, for a brief moment, almost like Joy.

“Will it?” She stares up at him. This boy who is so loyal, so good. The perfect boyfriend. What does Luce do with
perfect
now, though, when everything else around her has fallen apart?

“What can I do?” he asks her. “What do you need?”

She shakes her head, trying to find the right vocabulary. “I just need . . .” She thinks of Tali's strength, of Zoe's independence, of Joy's quiet depth. How when she's with her friends, she feels somehow bigger than when she's alone, more powerful.

She looks out at the dark yard beyond their pool of light, the trees thick and looming, and beyond them, a seemingly endless smattering of stars blinking down on half the world at once. “Space,” she says now, realizing it. “I need space.” The confession burns her throat like a vodka shot. “Maybe forever. I'm not sure.” She's never had to say anything this hard before. She feels destructive. Out
of control. Like she is sinking in quicksand and she wants to grab on to him, but would only bring him down with her.

Andrew puts his arm down and looks at her, stricken for a second. His face twitches, and she prays that he won't cry. She's seen him cry only twice: once when his grandfather died last
November, and once when he broke his leg skiing and had to miss out on varsity soccer. It kills her to be the one hurting him now.

“I'm sorry,” she whispers. She wants to take it back, but she can't.

He clears his throat. “No, I . . . I get it,” he says finally.

Now it's her turn to stare. “You do?”

“We're both going to different colleges. We have our whole lives ahead of us. And . . . it's like Mr. Wilkinson said. You can't plan for everything.”

“You remember that?” she asks, stunned, like she has just stumbled upon a trick question on a pop quiz, and the more she studies it, the further she drifts from the right answer, deeper into confusion.

“Yeah, he used to say that all the time. Like when the sailing team lost because of some sort of westerly wind.” Andrew gives her a small, sad smile. “You know I remember it all, babe,” he replies.

The familiar saying hovers in the air between them—ironically confirming both that the past never changed, and that Andrew hasn't either. It's just a statement, a final admission of how much he loves her, how much
real
history they've shared. And the words cut some invisible tether inside her, loosen the rope holding her above the quicksand. Gravity pulls her under. The emotion rattles her small frame, a tide coming through, a wave she has been holding back for so long she forgot it was even there. Now it rises to submerge her, sobs choking through her.

She doesn't know the last time she cried. Luciana Cruz isn't a crier; she's a fixer. She holds it together for everyone. But here she is, crying for the first time since she was a little kid, since before she was the one who had to make sure her siblings did their homework after school. Since before she had to make sure that at least 76 percent of her Brewster classmates passed the SATs with Ivy-level scores, before being captain, or leader, or valedictorian kept her up and sleepless, before she was the one who had to make sure that Amelia took the right pills each morning, that the driveway lights were on for Dad at night, and her mom's Tupperware-sealed meals were each properly labeled in the fridge for tomorrow.

She cries for her parents, who never had the perfect happy marriage she believed they did, and more, she cries for the whole idea of perfection, which feels like a giant red balloon that has finally popped, or slipped from her grasp and fled into the sky. She cries for Andrew, who is sitting beside her so stoic and solid and, she knows, so totally heartbroken. Curling into her body, she cries for herself, and how much she'll miss him.

She even cries for her
former
self, the girl who struggled so hard to fit into a mold, that she became just that: a mold, like the kind they once used to make clay sculptures at camp. Just the shape of a girl. An idea of a girl. A shell.

But most of all, she knows, she is crying for Joy.

Zoe's blond head hovers like an alien sun just to the side of Joy's bunk bed.
I can't sleep,
she's whispering. And then she climbs up the ladder and they're lying side by side, giggling in the darkness.

Dimly, Joy hears the sound of machines beeping. She turns her head slightly, trying to breathe in the smell of the night. Outside, the cool, clear lake goes on forever, deep and glacial. Giddy laughter echoes off the trees.

She sucks in oxygen, its tubes leaving a familiar plastic, sticky feeling on her face. The sound of it is like the
shush
of the lake itself, lapping at the rocks. And now Joy is standing in the shallow water near the footbridge, the moon casting violet ripples on the surface. Ryder is facing her, looking into her eyes, touching her, kissing her and kissing her. Love wasn't so hard to find after all, once she stopped running from it.

And now she's holding Tali and Luce's hands, leaping past the tire swing, over the cliffs, as though flying.

She
is
flying.

Joy wakes up and must immediately close her eyes again against the bright florescent hospital lights above her. She opens them once more and blinks. She feels dizzy and nauseated. Until she remembers: The water. The laughter. Her friends. Her past.

When she snuck out the other night, yanking the oxygen cords from her face and stripping out of her hospital gown, changing shakily into her jeans and boots, then slipping the car keys from her mom's purse while she went to get dinner (her parents had been taking turns staying the night), Joy had expected one evening of escape, a chance to bury all the memories and say good-bye.

She had gotten so much more than that.

“Oh good. You're awake,” says a voice.

It takes effort for Joy to turn her head—she's
so
tired—but she does, and sees George Townsend, her nurse, taking her vitals. “Boy George,” she says. “How long have I been out?” Her lungs hurt when she breathes, but she tries to ignore it.

He smiles at her. “It's good to have you back. You shouldn't have run off like that. You know you need your beauty sleep.”

He leans over and sticks a needle into her arm. She hopes it'll make the breathing easier.

“What time is it?” she asks. Through the window, the sun appears to be setting.

“About seven. Your dad's napping and your mom is on the phone. Visiting hours are over, but we've made an exception. You've got friends here who have been asking to see you,” he says, removing a tray from below her bed. “Oh, and you got a phone call from someone.”

“A call?”

“Kid named Doug,” he says, shrugging. “Dialed the main line. Said he got the number on a cruise or something.”

“From the Cruz,” she fills in.

“You know him? Let me find the message,” says George, rummaging through a pile of notes in one of his long scrubs pockets. “There he is. Doug Ryder. Gina wrote down his number, just in case.” He puts the note down next to her bed. “Should I tell your friends they can come in now?”

“Actually,” Joy says, her breath coming short. “Could I . . . could I have a phone? I want to make this call first.”

“Ooo-ooh,” George says in a singsong voice. “I get it. No problem, sweetie. I'm on it.”

Joy smiles, plastic tubes crinkling against her cheeks. “Don't be a dork, George,” she says.

Moments later, he appears with a phone, saying, “I'll tell them to come in a few, okay?”

She nods. It's a little easier than speaking. “Thanks, BG,” she says to his back as he leaves the room.

It seems like the phone rings forever—a concept Joy now believes is fully possible. If she thought hell were a real thing, she'd be sure it was an unanswered call. But in this moment that seems to stretch infinitely in two directions, she has all the time in the world to wait for his voice, which comes, at last, like a wave breaking. “Hello?”

“Hey, Ryder.”

There's a pause. “Is this Joy? From camp?”

She smiles. “The very same.”

He takes in a breath. There's another pause—a long one. Finally he says, “How? How did you find it?”

“You taught it to me,” she answers.

“No, I didn't,” he protests. “I would remember. I've never shown anyone those lyrics before.”

“I memorized them,” she says simply.

Another pause. “I don't understand it. I don't understand it at all, but . . . Joy?”

“Yeah?”

“I don't even know how you got ahold of it and I know we never got to know each other that well at camp, and I'm sorry about that. But . . . I just can't believe it.”

“Can't believe . . . what?” she asks, her words flowing out of her with only the slightest effort.

“How good my song sounded in your voice,” he says. “It's incredible. I had no idea this song was any good until I played your recording. It popped up in my email this morning kind of like a miracle. I'd forgotten I even wrote it.”

She finds her hand is clutching the phone hard, her breathing is more painful. She wants him to
remember
. She wants it to have been real. She thinks of his lyrics:

Now I climb another wall,

Look out from another height,

Trying to remember it all

Scared that I just might.

But it's clear, oh so clear

You'll never be here

Because every day, a little more

You disappear, you disappear, you disappear.

“Joy? Are you still there?” he asks quietly.

“Still here.”

“I thought you'd disappeared,” he says, practically a whisper. “Are you okay? I saw you fall at the reunion. The ambulance came . . . I know you're still in the hospital, but they wouldn't tell me anything.”

There's too much to say, and every word hurts. So she settles on the most important thing. “I
will
be okay, Ryder.”

He lets out a breath. “Maybe we could . . . maybe when you're feeling better, we could, I don't know, hang out. Get to know each other. Maybe play some music together. If you want, that is.”

Something between laughter and tears is happening inside her right now, but she's not sure she has the strength to get it out. She nods, though he can't see her. She manages: “That would be really nice.”

“Okay, then,” he says. “It's settled.” Just like he said when they were rock climbing. In the past. In the dream. In the memory. In the future. In the summer days that existed completely outside of time, where Joy found herself again. Where they found each other.

“Good-bye, Doug,” she says.

“Good-bye, Joy,” he says.

It would be so easy to close her eyes again. So easy to go back to the dreams, or the memories—not that it matters which. She tries to convince herself that she doesn't hate this place. Here at MCCP, just ten minutes south of Portland, everything is black and white. Everything is long Latinate words that should belong on one of Luce's SAT study spreadsheets, not in her medical files.
Peripheral primitive neuroectodermal tumors.
Such ugly words, for such ugly things. Unbelievable how our own bones, our own cells, can betray us. Inexplicable. Unfair. And in her case, unavoidable, no matter how hard she has tried to run from it for two whole years.

But her friends are here—gathered together like the four elements, to see her. While she waits for them, Joy tries to decide who would be which element. Luce, the swimmer and always the organized, reliable one would likely be water. Zo would be earth—steady, loyal, grounded . . . and often covered in
actual
mud. Then there's Tali—impatient, hot-tempered, constantly blowing things out of proportion. Also, she's a runner and can travel faster than any of the rest of them, even if, sometimes, she carelessly destroys things in her path. Yup,
definitely
fire.

So that leaves wind for Joy. Which kind of works: sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce.
Check.
Usually a little bit invisible, except in the way that she affects others, bringing them together and then letting them scatter again.
Check.
Sometimes, when the music's right, causing them to dance, like leaves. At least, that's how it used to be.

Wind.

Touching everything.

Just passing through.

They come through the doorway in a noisy jumble, their voices dissolving the silence. In that moment, Joy can breathe again. The ache in her bones, in her whole body, seems distant, easy to tune out—just faint white noise, fading into the background.

“So serious,” Joy says with a smile, because if she doesn't make a joke, she might cry. Tali has her arms folded across her chest and is picking at the elbow of her purposefully shredded off-the-shoulder sweater. Luce looks pale and shocked, dark bags beneath her eyes. Zoe looks as though she was just yanked from bed only moments ago.

This is why she didn't want them to know for so long. This is why she never told them.

“Come on,” she says, trying to make her voice louder, firmer. “Get it together, people. Who's here to cheer up who?”

“Whom,” Luce corrects automatically. And then she's smiling, too.

Relief washes through Joy's chest. “I'm so happy you guys came,” she says. “I had . . . the most bizarre dream. We all went back in time—back to our last summer at Camp OK. It was . . . it was so real.”

Zoe shakes her head. “I had that dream, too,” she says.

Tali and Luce look at each other, and then back at Joy. “I think we
all
did,” Tali says carefully.

“Whatever happened to us,” Luce says, “we all felt it. It was
real
.”

Joy blinks. Somehow she already knew that this was true—that the four of them must have been given a miracle: a second
chance, one golden bubble of opportunity to go back and try again. And maybe one version of the past wasn't better than the other—maybe that isn't the point.

After all, she's still dying.

Maybe the only thing that really stuck from their trip back in time is inside them now, just a spark, evidence that there's more to this world than everyone else thinks. Maybe that's what forever really means.

“Just promise me you guys will . . . hold up your end of the bargain, then,” Joy says, each word coming out slow and labored now. But it's too important not to say.

“Our end of the bargain?” Zoe repeats.

Joy nods. “What we wrote . . . on the photo-booth wall.”

Tali takes a deep breath. “That we would all be friends forever?”

Joy lets out a breath and smiles. “Promise.”

She sees a tear streaking down Tali's cheek, bringing with it a dark trail of mascara, but Joy no longer has it in her to tell her to stop, to tell her it will all be okay. Even better than okay—fantastic. It's what she always used to say.

Zoe leans down and hugs her gently. “Of course we promise,” she whispers.

Luce leans in, too, taking Joy's hand. “You can fight this, Joy,” Luce says, serious, like she's coaching her on a difficult SAT question. “I know you can do this. It's going to be all right.”

Zoe is crying now, too. Joy wants to hug her, to make her feel better, to fold her into her side on the narrow hospital bed. But she is so tired. Movement is too hard. So she lets the girls cry, lets
them hug her, lets them try to dry their own eyes on the backs of their sleeves. Inexplicably—despite everything—Joy feels oddly, wildly happy.

This was all she wanted. To feel whole again.

And then, the weirdest thing happens. As her friends pull away to give her some space, she sees the
sun
.

They're standing on the Okahatchee soccer field, breaking from a huddle.
I'll sneak off after the second relay,
Zoe is saying.
I'll take the path through the woods
, Tali responds.
And I'll stay on lookout, then meet you at the Stevens,
Luce says with an official nod.

Behind their heads, the trees are swaying, sunlight breaking through the leaves at the edge of the field where the woods begin, making white spots in Joy's vision. Shadows and light, dancing across her skin. She can feel the warmth of the sun and closes her eyes, watching the shapes behind her eyelids grow brighter and brighter into just white.

This is forever,
the light says. She smiles, realizing there was never any proof of it, just this feeling, just this truth.