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Tuesday morning I force myself to get up and shower and eat a few spoonfuls of cereal and drink a glass of orange juice. Enough to convince Grams that I don’t need a doctor.
“Take the car to school today,” she says. “I don’t need it until this evening, and I’ll feel safer knowing you’re not walking around where the red Honda can find you.”
“Okay,” I say.
I feel like my whole being is sunk to the size of a walnut and it’s hiding in the deepest part of my body it can find, somewhere between my belly button and my spine—a tiny me.
“You still don’t look very chipper,” Grams says.
“I’ll be okay,” I tell her, but in my heart I know that’s not true.
I pick up my backpack and get into the car, as if I’m going to school. I do drive past the school, slowly. There is Tyler, sitting on the bench, looking toward the parking lot as if he’s waiting for someone. As if he’s waiting for me. As if the whole world weren’t changed.
It is a gray morning, gray sky, gray outlines of mountains, gray air, all the more gray when seen through tears. I drive to the foothills, park, and walk. The hundreds of times I’ve walked this path guide my steps. Step after step, trying to think, then trying not to think. Think. Don’t think.
I walk past Baby Hope’s bush, on to the waterfall. There hasn’t been much rain lately, and the waterfall is more of a trickle than a fall. The pool below is shallow and muddy. I pick up one of the heaviest river rocks I can lift and smash it down into the mud, pretending it is smashing into Shawna’s face. Rock after rock. Smash Shawna. Smash Shawna—time after time, until my arms are so tired I can’t lift another rock. Nothing works. Nothing makes things better.
I walk to the peak and sit near the edge of the trail, looking down on the valley below. Not much can be seen on a day like this. It is murky, like the pool at the waterfall, like my soul.
On my way down I pause at Baby Hope’s bush. I get out my journal and sit down, ready to write. But all I can think of is why. Why? Why? When everything was so good. Tears come again. It seems I should be empty of tears by now, but they keep coming. I start taking deep breaths, to calm myself, but that reminds me of Tyler, how he taught me to do that, and I cry even harder. I won’t think of it anymore, I tell myself. I won’t think of them, there in the office. But as soon as I think that, their image, Tyler on Shawna, overwhelms me.
Sometime in the afternoon, by the bush, my mind goes back to the tiny Baby Hope on the trail, blue and barely breathing, and then to seeing Grams breathing into her, a pinkish tone gradually coming to the baby’s face, and for a moment Baby Hope coming alive overcomes the scene from the dimly lit office of the nursery.
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As I walk through our back door, the phone is ringing and Grams is hovering over it, reading the displayed number.
“It’s so hard to remember not to answer the phone,” she tells me. “I’ve been answering the phone all my life, and now . . .”
Tyler’s voice comes on, “I really have to talk to you, Lauren. I can explain everything. Call me when you get home.”
I press the erase button and walk back to my bedroom. In just a few minutes the phone rings again. This time it is Amber.
“An answering machine? Welcome to the twenty-first century. Call me. Where were you today, anyway?”
Grams opens my bedroom door. “Amber asked where you were didn’t you go to school today?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I just couldn’t,” I sigh.
“Lauren, I know you can’t always share your personal secrets with me, but if you’re in trouble, let me help.”
“Oh, Grams, no one can help.”
“Well . . . whatever it is, as awful as it may seem, you’ve still got to go to school.”
“I know,” I say. “I just can’t stand to see Tyler right now.”
“He said he could explain,” Grams says. “Maybe you should give him a chance.”
“I can’t.”
“But he’s such a nice young man . . .”
“Oh, Grams,” I say, letting my voice show annoyance.
After a long silence, Grams asks, “Pizza sound good for tonight?”
“Sure,” I say.
“The usual?”
“Sure.”
I know she’s trying to make me feel better. Pizza always used to work if my team had lost at soccer, or I’d messed up on a spelling test. Pizza was good for that. The sadness I’m feeling now is bigger than pizza, though.
The phone rings again. This time, no one leaves a message. I open Jane Eyre and read of her terrible loneliness and despair at having had to be separated from Mr. Rochester. She wishes she had died in the night, but then she thinks, “Life, however, was yet in my possession: with all its requirements, and pains, and responsibilities. The burden must be carried; the want provided for; the suffering endured, the responsibility fulfilled. ”
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I guess that’s one way to look at things right now. Life is a burden that must be carried. I must eat my pizza, and go to school, and do everything I’ve done before. Everything but love Tyler. Everything but trust that promises can be kept. I guess that still leaves me being one of the “everything but” girls. Except now I don’t know what the “everything” stands for. It seems more like nothing is left.
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Amber comes over, unannounced, as Grams and I are finishing dinner.
“Oh, Amber. I’m glad you’re here. It’s our Scrabble night at Betty’s, and I’d feel better about going if Lauren weren’t left all alone.”
“I’ll babysit,” Amber says with a laugh.
I force a smile, then start clearing the table.
As soon as Grams is out the door, Amber says, “Tell me everything!”
“I really don’t want to talk about it,” I say.
“What happened, anyway?” Amber asks, as if she’s not even heard that I don’t want to talk.
I shake my head.
“Tyler keeps telling me ‘I’ve got to talk to Lauren. Get Lauren to talk to me,’ like his vocabulary is limited to about ten words.”
As if on cue, the phone rings and it’s Tyler, leaving the same message. “Talk to me, Lauren.”
“Aren’t you going to pick up?” Amber says.
“No.”
“When are you going to talk to him?”
“Never.”
“Lauren! How can you do that? He’s the love of your life, remember?”
“That’s what I thought. I was wrong.”
“But everything was fine at the Habitat house. What happened?”
As much as I don’t want to talk about it, I hear myself start the story, slowly at first, and then as fast as the words will come.
“You’re sure?” Amber asks, eyes wide with surprise.
“Sure.”
“Tyler with Shawna? Doing it? In the nursery office? Are you serious?”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“Unbelievable!”
“Believe it,” I say.
I tell Amber about going to the foothills, and smashing Shawna’s pretend face with giant rocks.
“Why Shawna?”
“Why SHAWNA??”
I am amazed that Amber can ask such a stupid question. “No, I mean, why not Tyler? He’s the one to be mad at.”
“But if it weren’t for Shawna none of this would have happened.”
“He’s a guy. There’d have been someone else.”
“I guess.”
“But he had me fooled, too. Tyler was the last guy I thought would do something like that,” Amber says. “You’re sure you saw what you thought you saw? You said it was really dark.”
“I’m sure, Amber. I’m as sure as I can be. Don’t ask me that again.”
The phone rings again. We listen. This time it’s Shawna.
“Lauren, I need to talk to you. I can explain.”
“This is weird,” Amber says. “You should hear what she has to say. And you should at least give Tyler a chance. I mean, he’s been like the perfect guy. Maybe there is some explanation, like they were just pretending or something.”
“Amber. I know what I saw.”
“Okay. Okay. It’s just so unbelievable, that’s all.”
There are three more phone calls before Amber leaves. One for Grams and two from Tyler. I erase the ones from Tyler.
“Shall I pick you up for school in the morning?” Amber says. “I’m sure I can borrow Mom’s car tomorrow.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say.
“Coach Terry was mad to the highest power that you weren’t there yesterday or today. Better be prepared for a lecture, especially after she finds out today was unexcused.”
“I dread going to school,” I say.
“I’ll stay right beside you all day tomorrow. You don’t want to talk to people?—I’ll block them.”
She shows me her special jump-up-and-down-in-front-of- my- face conversation block. I feel myself smile for the first time in days.
“I’ll even go to creative writing with you if you want me to.”
“Thanks,” I say, realizing what a good friend Amber truly is.
“Hey. You’ve always been there for me. I’ll be there for you, Kinky Sister.”
“Okay, Sister Blondie,” I say, smiling again.
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The smiles don’t keep me from crying myself to sleep later, when the house is quiet and dark. I’m still as sad as I’ve ever been. But talking with Amber helped some. Not that anything has changed, but that the burden is shared. If only I could get out of going to school tomorrow, seeing Shawna, seeing Tyler, seeing the night-time scene replayed again and again. I don’t know if I can do that or not.