Things I'm Seeing Without You Page 20

  I slowed my step.

  ‘I dropped out of school,’ I said.

  ‘You dropped out of a school,’ said Grace. ‘One school. For reasons of bereavement and mental distress. I think we can find you another one.’

  We were approaching the taco truck.

  ‘Listen, Tess,’ said Grace, ‘I think you have a hell of a lot to offer this industry if that’s what you want to do with your life. You are a smart, capable, deeply empathetic person, and those are the skills you need to actually do this. But I also think you’re a seventeen-year-old in the final stages of mourning, and you don’t need to do something for ever because it helped you through a difficult time.’

  I shielded my eyes against the sun.

  ‘There are plenty of other ways to contribute. And you need time to figure that out. Finish high school. Go to college. Find out what you want. Find out what you don’t want. Screw up some more. Get your heart broken again. Try to be decent along the way. That’s how you make a life.’

  Grace got in the line behind one other person.

  ‘It’s easy to get stuck. To let one big thing hold you in place. And it’s such a waste. Don’t fall for it. It will keep you from everything.’

  Grace paused for a breath. I looked over at her.

  ‘That can’t be all your advice,’ I said.

  She smiled.

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘It’s not. Get the HPV vaccine. And order some tacos, for Christ’s sake! I’m starving.’

  I ordered and when my tacos came out, I took a small bite of the first one. It tasted good. So salty it stunned my tongue. The two of us ate and watched the crowd build at the taco truck. A couple of pierced boys rode by on tall bikes, and I watched them pedal away with purpose. Eventually, we finished and got up to walk back to the office. When I got back to my desk, she brought me something.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Your dad gave me this. It came to his house yesterday.’

  She held out a single letter, and I grabbed it with my thumb and forefinger. I looked at it for a moment. His handwriting, in blue pen, was messy but legible. Eventually, I opened it up. It said:

  Dear Tess,

  I don’t know how to write letters. That will become very apparent soon. I don’t think I’ve written one since I went to camp the summer after fifth grade and got a tick on my eyelid. In fact, I’m so out of practice, I had to type this out first, and now I’m transferring it to my mom’s stationery with a pen, which explains the flowers on the bottom of each page. I hope you like begonias.

  Anyway, this isn’t going to be a long letter. I know much has already been said. And I don’t want to rehash our conversation from the airport. In fact, I’d like to forget that the airport ever happened, maybe. Instead: I just want to do something small. I don’t know why, but I want to tell you about the first time I met you.

  It was November, I think. And I had just come back from a night class to find my dorm room dim. There was a video game glowing on the TV, a little sword-wielding avatar running in place, frozen in his mission. I didn’t see Jonah at first. He was on his bed, taking deep breaths and rubbing his temples. I asked him if he was OK, and he said yeah. Just a headache. No big deal. A week earlier I might have believed him. But he’d been having a lot of these ‘headaches’ lately, and I was starting to suspect that maybe there was something more going on.

  But I sat down at his desk nearby and asked him if he needed anything. He said yes. I was thinking Advil maybe. A glass of water. But when I asked him what, he said he needed me to respond to you.

  Now I had heard all about you at this point. Jonah had told me about Iowa and the way you guys continued talking online. He told me that you were beautiful. That you were funny. That he wished he lived in Iowa so he could be with you all the time. And I believed him, of course. He didn’t lie about people.

  So you guys had been Gchatting, I guess, and apparently he had just walked away to lie down. But he forgot to tell you. He forgot to sign off. And that’s what he wanted me to do.

  ‘What should I say?’ I asked him.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Anything. Just say I have homework or something.’

  ‘As you, though.’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  So, that’s what I did. I wrote in his voice, some excuse about having homework and that I needed to sign off. And I would have left it at that, but you wrote back really fast.

  ‘You never gave me an answer . . .’ you said.

  I looked over at Jonah. He was wincing.

  ‘To what?’ I wrote.

  ‘Jesus,’ you said. ‘You have short-term memory problems.’

  ‘I know,’ I wrote.

  Then you wrote: ‘The million-dollar question: would you rather have no penis or five?’

  I laughed out loud at that point, I think. And I asked Jonah the question. But he didn’t answer. He was asleep, or pretending to be. I glanced back at the screen and you had written again.

  ‘Just kidding. Now quit stalling and tell me if you’ve ever been in love.’

  I watched the blinking cursor. And I thought about coming clean about my identity right then. But it didn’t seem right to mess up this moment. That was one of my justifications. And given what I knew about Jonah, I felt like I could answer the question honestly. That was the other. So, I answered it. I wrote:

  ‘Not until now.’

  You took a moment to write back. And then you wrote: ‘Sorry, but I’ll never fall for a man with five penises.’

  And I said: ‘That’s OK because I don’t have one at all’.

  And then you sent a smile and signed off.

  On the one hand, it felt like nothing much had just happened. I had flirted for a friend. And I had done a decent job, I guess. On the other hand, it started to occur to me that I had just told you Jonah loved you. In so many words. But I don’t think I was writing for Jonah in that moment.

  I know it’s absurd. I had no right. I understood that on some level. You didn’t know me. And really, I didn’t know you. But I felt like I did. Or maybe, as I tried to explain before, I just wanted to be part of it.

  And I knew already that Jonah was starting to retreat from you. He was ducking away from everything, and I didn’t know why. I just knew he was going to let you go, and I didn’t want that to happen. So, at first, I thought what I was doing was selfless. I was keeping love alive.

  However imperfect.

  I know now that I was doing something else. And I wish every day that I had met you under different circumstances. That you knew me as a different person. But I don’t think we would have met in any other way, Tess. And I think now that maybe what I was doing was reaching out to someone else who knew this amazing person. Someone who might be able to help me as he slowly disappeared from my life.

  I guess this turned into a long letter.

  The only thing I want to say before I stop this thing is that I don’t know what created this feeling for me. But I don’t care. I would like you to be a part of my life. If I have to write more of these letters, I will. And if I have to come to Minnesota once a month to convince you to be my friend, I will. But, in the end, my answer was true that day.

  I have only been in love once.

  I was crying when Grace came back to my desk. She just stood there for a moment, unsure what to do. But eventually, she put a hand on my shoulder and then leant in.

  ‘It’s slow,’ she said. ‘There are no clients. Why don’t you go home for the day?’

  I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my shirt.

  ‘I’ll just ride back with you when you’re done,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean home home.’

  I was still holding the letter. Now I started to fold it back up.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘There.’

  She opened her purse and dug out some money. She handed me a twenty-dollar bill.

  ‘I called you a cab,’ she said. ‘I can bring your stuff by later.’

  ‘Grace,
’ I said, but I started to cry again.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  I walked out on to the street where there was already a taxi waiting for me. And I hopped inside. As the guy took off towards my father’s neighbourhood, I came back to myself a little, and I remembered that I hadn’t finished my blog entry. I had left it half-done on the computer. I knew it would be there for me when I came back. It wasn’t a big deal. But I had this itch of unfinished business. Finally, it hit me that it wasn’t the blog I was thinking about.

  I pulled out my phone and broke every rule I had set up. I texted Daniel.

  There’s one last thing we need to do.

  I waited a few minutes and then his reply came back.

  What’s that?

  I wrote back immediately.

  Take him offline. I know you have the passwords. It’s time.

  There was a significant pause this time. So I wrote again.

  All the accounts you wrote me from. They shouldn’t be there any more. They aren’t ours.

  I know. But it just seems like the end of something.

  It’s not the end.

  You said so yourself.

  There was another pause then a new message.

  You got the letter.

  I did.

  I realized something after I sent it.

  What?

  You never answered the question yourself. On that first day.

  That’s true.

  I waited. He sent no follow-up. He was waiting for me.

  My answer has changed since then.

  Still nothing from him. I wrote:

  I have been in love twice.

  It came so easily from my fingertips that I immediately suspected it wasn’t true. But when the tears came back, I knew that it probably was. He wrote:

  You owe me a letter, Tess Fowler.

  Then:

  I’ll leave the FB page for a memorial. Everything else will be gone by tonight.

  And then what happens?

  Like you said:

  Something imperfect.

  And then before he signed off:

  I’ll be watching my mailbox.

  I put the phone in my pocket and I looked out the cab window as the heat of the afternoon made waves in the air of the city. It was just before rush hour, and the roads were nearly empty. After the driver got off the freeway, we passed a public high school. A long brick building with what looked like hundreds of small windows. It was out for the summer, and an American flag flapped lazily in the light breeze. Is that where I’d end up going? It was unimaginable.

  The cab pulled up at my father’s house, and I gave him Grace’s money and got out. Part of me expected to see her jeep parked in the driveway with her rowing shell on top. But of course, she wouldn’t have put me in a cab just to drive here herself.

  I walked through the screen door and let it slap closed behind me. The house was a little cleaner than usual, and in the hallway, I noticed the tacky wallpaper had been stripped down. It sat in sheets along the wall.

  ‘Dad!’ I said.

  There were buckets of paint by the staircase, and the first few steps were painted a clean white colour instead of the dingy brown that used to be there. There was plastic on the railing.

  ‘Dad,’ I said. ‘Are you having a nervous breakdown?’

  No answer. I kept walking until I got to the living room where I found my father on the couch with tears in his eyes.

  ‘You are having a nervous breakdown,’ I said.

  He didn’t look up at me. His eyes were fixated on the television. I followed his gaze and saw myself. I saw myself in a cave in Sicily. He was watching the footage. As far as I knew, we had not received it from Paul yet. But now it was playing in my dad’s living room.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked.

  Again, he didn’t look up. He pointed to an open envelope on the coffee table. I recognized the return address as Grace’s.

  He motioned for me to sit down. So, I walked across the room and sat on the ratty couch next to my father, who was covered in splatters of paint and a gummy substance that was probably wallpaper paste. He put his arm around me, and I didn’t care that he was getting paint on me. Then I looked back at the screen. The dust was swirling in the air, glittering in the Mediterranean light. And all of us were standing silent.

  ‘I liked what you said,’ he whispered.

  I nodded.

  ‘It wasn’t bad,’ I said.

  Paul was shooting us walking down the trail now. Moving towards the valley below. As the angle of the light changed, we looked like silhouettes against the rock face.

  I looked away from the screen. The walls of the living room were scraped down, too. Patches of old paint colours were coming through.

  ‘Are you tearing this place down?’ I asked.

  He smiled.

  ‘I thought I’d make it habitable now that there’re two of us.’

  ‘Two of us?’ I asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘Does that mean I’m getting a bedroom?’

  ‘If you mean a room with a bed,’ he said. ‘Then yes. You are getting one of those. If you don’t max out any credit cards this week, you might even get a chest of drawers.’

  He chuckled at his own joke. And he was already walking out of the room into the kitchen where he had something going for dinner. I thought about following him in. I wanted to ask him more about my room. But instead, I sat there and watched the end of the footage.

  We were so far down now that Paul couldn’t get us in focus. If I squinted, I could see us moving. But it was hard to tell. He tried to zoom in, but we were indistinguishable from the water below. I know I was down there. But everything around me was so big and dazzling there was no way to find me.

  And maybe, I thought, that was OK.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Hello, reader. The book you have just finished almost never happened. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but there was a time when I thought I would never figure out how to make it work. It took years to find its voice and without the help of some wonderful people, I’m not sure it would ever have made it there. So, here goes:

  First of all, thank you to Junita Bognanni for reading a 470-page draft of this book four times. Four times! And for listening to me talk about funeral practices at the dinner table for three years. Also, thank you for marrying me. Have I said that enough? You will always be my first reader, and the one who matters most.

  Thank you to Kathy Bognanni, who has read more books than anyone I know, and who gave me a no-nonsense reading along with a vision of what this book could be. Thank you to Cecil Castellucci for a revelatory conversation about Young Adult literature in a crowded bar in Minneapolis, and for an agent recommendation that changed everything. Thank you, Kirby Kim, agent of agents, for guiding this thing perfectly and giving me the encouragement to finish it. I’m happy to have you as a friend and a partner in crime. Thank you, too, to Brenna English-Loeb, Cecile Barendsma, and everyone else at Janklow & Nesbit.

  An enormous thank you to Namrata Tripathi, my phenomenal editor. You understood this book better than I did when we first spoke on the phone, and you have challenged and supported me every step of the way. It has been an honour to work with you. And thanks to Lily Yengle, my amazing publicist, and everyone at Dial Books for Young Readers.

  I first began this book at the American Academy in Rome on the best fellowship an artist can receive. Thank you to the Academy and to the readers who selected me for an experience where I met some of the greatest humans on the planet and sang in the hardest-working Sinatra cover band this side of the Janiculum Hill.

  Thank you to my colleagues and students at Macalester College, who inspire me on a daily basis. Readers, givers of advice, and amateur mental health professionals include: Tarik Karam, Matt Burgess, Nick Dybek, Ethan Rutherford, Hamlett Dobbins, Peter Livolsi, and Alex Albright.

  Thank you to my guru, and father, Sal Bognanni, and to Mark Bognanni
, the smartest person I know. Thank you to all the Bognannis and all the Rhynas crew for your love and unwavering belief in me.

  Finally, to Roman Bognanni: I was writing this book in the hospital after you were born, wondering, after I looked at your tiny face, how I would ever finish another novel again. Now I know: I just have to look at myself the way you look at me, and then sit down at the computer. I can’t wait to hear the stories you invent.

  TRY ANOTHER GREAT BOOK FROM CHICKEN HOUSE

  FACELESS by ALYSSA SHEINMEL

  When Maisie is burnt in a terrible accident, her face is partially destroyed. She’s lucky enough to get a face transplant, but how do you live your life when you can’t even recognize yourself any more? As Maisie discovers how much her looks shaped her relationship to the world, she has to redefine her own identity, and figure out what ‘lucky’ really means.

  Paperback, ISBN 978-1-910655-19-1, £7.99 • ebook, ISBN 978-1-910655-35-1, £7.99

  Text © Peter Bognanni 2017

  First published in the United States in 2017 by Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  First paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2018

  This electronic edition published in 2018

  Chicken House

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  Peter Bognanni has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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