“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “It’s a feeling I have, that’s all.”
I couldn’t read his face.
But I’m going to find out, I thought but didn’t say. She wouldn’t leave me alone if I didn’t.
He moved toward me then. I felt his hand on my chin, and his mouth on my mouth, and before I knew it I’d pulled away, putting some needed inches between us. A hand was out, shoving into his chest. That was my hand, making it impossible for him to get any closer.
I watched confusion cross his face, then something worse that looked a lot like anger. I’d never shoved him away from me before; I didn’t even know why I had.
“Who was that who called you?” I blurted out randomly. I hadn’t been bothered by it then, in Cabin 3 when he’d answered the phone, but in this moment something told me I should be.
“When?” he asked. He was frozen, leaning over my seat as if suspended in midair. My arm was still out, my unlined hand pressed up hard against his chest as if I were the one keeping him there, dangling. And I was.
I watched him move away from my hand, shrink back and retreat. It felt like witnessing something die between us, a stop-animation visual of a rotting and shriveling thing turning to particles of gray dust, then the wind lifting that dust up and away until there was nothing. I knew I should care. Only a few days ago, I would have fought it, leaped to close the distance, said I was sorry. Yet I did no such thing.
“Who called you? On the phone?” I repeated. “In the cabin before. Someone called.”
“Oh, just my manager at work. Telling me my schedule for next week.” He was in his own seat by this point, not even looking at me.
“Really,” I said. “Who did you say it was?”
“My manager. At work,” he said again. He waited tables at Casa Lupita, a Mexican restaurant across the river, and it was true he never knew his schedule until the week before. “Next week I’m on Tuesday night, Thursday night, Saturday day.”
“Okay,” I said. “Right.”
Something told me not to believe him.
And that something was irrational, and that something was unexplainable, and that something had never entered my mind before this night, and yet it was there, related to everyone and anyone.
Even the boy I’d lost my virginity to, the one I’d talked about staying with after graduation, into college, which was as far ahead as we’d ever let ourselves think into the future. Even Jamie. Even him.
Jamie’s neck snapped around, and there was a light in his eyes I didn’t recognize, like I’d struck a match and lit him up.
“What is going on here?” he said.
“I really don’t know,” I answered honestly. My voice felt so cold.
“But something is,” he said. “With us.
First bailing on the restaurant. Then this place, this thing with that girl you never even told me about. Now—whatever the fuck this is.”
He didn’t wait for me to confirm or deny it. He slammed the van door, got back into his own car, and drove off. He made a left down Dorsett Road and let the trees steal his taillights and the wind steal any sound of his engine and the night steal my chance to fix it, not that I knew how to, or was even sure I would.
It happened so fast that I sat there waiting for him to come back, and when he didn’t I was surprised, and then that surprise sunk lower and lower until it turned into a hard, black coal inside me that harbored three leaden words: Told.
You. So.
I didn’t have him when I needed him, which meant I didn’t need him at all. He left me alone so I could be free to find what came next.
Though the truth is, I wasn’t alone.
After he was gone, there was Abby, in the bench seat behind me as if she’d witnessed the whole scene and had been holding her tongue until she was sure she had me to herself.
Our eyes met in the rearview.
In this instant, a thought planted itself in my head in a voice I didn’t recognize.
It’s good you got rid of him, it said.