☆ Evan ☆
The basement of the house Adrian is renting has a bookcase. It leers over me and grazes the ceiling with its dense height. When I touch it, the books risk spilling out. The scent of the yellowed, old pages triggers a memory I'd forgotten about, a memory from when Elaine was younger.
Randall used to have a bookcase like this. When he was gone and the bedroom was empty, I would creep out of my room after midnight, like I was afraid he'd come back and catch me. But he never did, and I would spend my nights curled in a knitted blanket on the floor, listening to the pipes howling, reading almanacs and history books and dozens of stories about shipwrecks.
Over time, Elaine joined me. She brought a flashlight and tossed the blanket over us to make a tent. And she would read the dictionary, sounding out the words piece by piece. That was before it ended, and one day when I entered the room, the books had been cleared. It had come and gone. In its place was a rectangular impression on the floor that it had left in its wake.
She once taught me a word about design—horror vacui. From what I understood, it's Latin for a fear of emptiness. It's a cluttered painting that fills the space with elements in every corner without leaving empty space. It's the opposite of my room at home; the opposite of the way my heart is surrounded in white space like an island.
This house, too, has no visual noise. I have to analyze it to pick out a detail that sings with history. And the bookshelf has a past—the pages are annotated in bright purple pen, and bookmarks are wedged between chapter headings like I could gather the trace of a person and reform them from this.
Like I'm not just occupying an impermanent place—a place between places. Like I can move a pen from the kitchen to the living room, and somebody is going to notice it there.
I head to the fridge and open it. The kitchen is wide and fitted with windows on every side of me. Pellets of ice slip down the glass and gather in lineups that stack like building blocks racing to the top.
The fridge is bare. A six-pack of beer sits on the top shelf. Below it is a tray of fruit and a water bottle that's one-quarter full. I shut the fridge door without bothering, only to reopen it a minute later, as if that'll fix the situation.
"Are you going out in this weather?" Adrian calls from the larger bedroom.
"Yeah, I've got to work in a few hours."
He emerges from the bedroom in a sleepy haze, a bulky sweater zipped to his neck. In the unoccupied space, the cold air settles down. The tile under my feet feels like standing on a flat stone. "I'll get groceries later. Would your sister want to come over?"
My veins freeze. A shiver crawls up my neck. I had planned to keep Carolyn from finding out. After all, she's three streets down. She doesn't leave the apartment building. I could make it work if I could prevent them from ever crossing paths with one another.
"I can ask," I say, which is a lie. No more lies. "Though, I'm not sure she'll want to."
Adrian takes the fruit tray from the fridge, offering me the side with strawberries. He muses over whether to sit or stay standing. And since I stayed in the guest room overnight, I know it's (highly) unlikely for him to be stagnant. He awoke no less than four times through the night, either to meander around the house or outside. (I don't really know which.)
"You don't have to. I just..." He sighs. Stops to collect his thoughts. "It would be a new start."
He seems to catch the look on my face—as much as I try to iron it back to normal—but it doesn't work. Adrian says, "What about coming to Alberta with me? Are you still considering that?"
"If you have space for me." I didn't expect that he would actually think about it.
"And you have to think about what you're leaving behind. Evan, when you were little, I wanted to spend time with you. I wanted to stay in this town. I didn't plan on moving away. But I couldn't bargain with your mother. She knew anything I said was an empty threat. What was I going to do? I couldn't take her to court. She moved on without me."
I shovel a handful of strawberries into my mouth while I listen. But I don't believe that. I don't think he tried to fight it. It's not as if I can have both. Maybe it's like a door that fully closes. Carolyn wouldn't reserve a place for me, in case I ever come back to her. Leaving is a final motion.
There's no blank space in that canvas. For as long as I stay in her grasp, I have a room. A place that belongs to me. And when I leave, it would no longer be mine. The boxes would be packed up and thrown out.
"It would be better to move in with you than to start fresh," I say. "If it doesn't work out, that doesn't matter either. I won't force it. If that's what I end up doing, I'd be fine with that. If it's a burden, well..."
The unsaid word hangs in the air. If I am a burden. In the universe Adrian currently inhabits, his main concerns are working and whoever he's dating at the moment, and neither of which I will be asking about.
As far as you are concerned, I do not exist. It's not as if my father has ever lied about that. He can bluff about it all he wants, but the truth was intertwined with that voicemail message.
"I didn't say that," Adrian replies, a bit too quiet. "What I was trying to get at is that if you leave, it's not the end. It's not a connection you can sever and be done with. You leave your friendships behind, too."
I cross my arms over my chest. "It's not the same."
"No? You risked your place on the hockey team for a friend." He moves into the living room, searching for the TV remote. It takes him a minute to find it, and when the screen turns on, a message pops up reading, No signal. He changes the channel to a static buzz. "Is it a friend?"
A light chuckle froths out of me before I can stop it. I told him about Claire breaking up with me only recently, and I guess he's already moved past that. "Yeah, no, we're friends."
Soon enough, it's time for me to head to work. I double back home to grab the car, and then I'm on my way. Since my bruise has yet to fade, I get stuck stocking shelves in the back room.
But my mind can't leave it alone. After all, before the hockey game, Lucas seemed to think the same about Peter and me. (It's the way you look at each other, he'd said. It's in the shared glances. I just assumed there was something there.)
(Yeah, right.)
I get to work, opening boxes and unpacking new products. The box cutter fits between my fingers like a knife, and it slices through the tape. Over and over. The repetition takes my focus, and for a few hours, I allow myself to forget about the twenty-four-seven chaos of my life.
☆ ☽ ☆
When I get back home, I nearly run into Randall and Elaine in the entryway. A waning light above head cuts out and returns, cleansing the apartment in a volatile lemon-yellow.
It smells like cinnamon, or maybe burnt toast. I itch the bandage on my hand.
"What's wrong?" I say.
Elaine shakes her head. Her eyes stray away from me, pinging between the floor and tugging at Randall's sleeve. Pointing to her phone, she says, "You didn't tell me before."
Oh. The cellphone bill.
The look on her face feels like a million knives stabbing into me. I chew on the inside of my cheek as the anger spills into annoyance. "You didn't have to know," I reply. "El, this is not your problem. Not even close. Please don't worry about bills and boring adult stuff."
"You say that like I have a choice," she says, lifting her eyebrows at me.
But Randall definitely had a choice. And why the hell did he tell her?
He didn't have to say a word. He could have kept his fucking mouth shut, and I wouldn't have to deal with any of this.
"Look, come on a drive with me," I tell her, which is really just code for, We need to talk.
We dodge out of the building. Elaine takes the passenger seat. Street lights curl over the pavement like flowers seeking the sun—connected by the power lines crisscrossing over the pathways.
The new heating system ticks like a metronome as the warmth pours out of it. Cars hurtle past the passenger side window and leave me in a puff of their dust.
In my haste to reach the grocery store, I nearly miss the turn. I slide around the corner at the last moment. A truck starts to reverse out of its spot near the back of the parking lot, so I flick on my turn signal and wait.
"You're very good at using your cell data, you know," I say. "Never once have you gone over. I think I got charged extra a couple of months ago, but that was totally my bad. I turned it on and forgot about it, so..."
The truck pulls out of the parking lot and loses itself in the fray of traffic; I move into the space.
"Are you trying to make me feel better?" Elaine asks. She turns to the windshield and unclips her seatbelt without moving for the door.
"Maybe."
She scoffs. "It isn't working. What are we doing here? We don't need groceries. Mom will get them."
Mom. I don't know why it makes me pause. I wish I could remember when I started calling Carolyn by her first name. She deserves worse, but being a mother is not a quality I can remove from her.
Elaine has parents. The family portrait minus me would look normal.
"Yeah." Excuses bounce around inside the husk of my brain. My train of thought has gone comatose. "Yeah, I know."
"If you're trying to imply something, I'm not getting it. What is this actually about? Claire? Or something else?" Elaine asks. When I don't answer her, she ponders it for a while. A minute. "Oh, it's graduation, isn't it? You're going to leave."
There's a word missing from her sentence. Leave me. That's what she means.
"You can't leave," she says, like it's an argument. She pushes her legs onto the passenger seat and coils her arms around them, cocooning herself inside a bubble of warmth. "You can't. If you leave, where are you going to go? I'll never see you again."
"Ellie—" I start, but the look in her eyes stops me. She's desperately holding the tears back. And maybe if I was taught how to cry, I would. But I don't know how to show emotion like that. I wouldn't know vulnerability if I had to emulate it. "Elaine," I say, louder this time, "what am I supposed to do? There's no place in this town for me."
"I don't know. I guess I just thought you would stay forever. But things are moving so fast—and it's already getting closer. It's like... it's like when we leave home. It doesn't feel real, not even on the day that it happens. It only feels real afterward. Most of mom's promises never come true. By now, I just expect that it won't happen."
The engine hums. I place my hand against the keys and shut it off, sending us into a decrescendo of quiet. "Most of the time, it doesn't," I agree. "But this is permanent. It was always going to come, eventually."
She sighs. It sounds like half of a scream. The kind that lights up inside my chest, and the kind I can't set free. Screaming would be the way my parents solve their issues.
(And lying isn't working for me like it used to.)
"I will be there for you. I wouldn't dare to miss anything," I say. "Just because I'm far away—just because I'm leaving town at the end of the year—it doesn't mean you'll be alone. I won't lie... it might feel like that sometimes. But you have to promise me you'll let me know when it happens."
Elaine looks up at me. "Promise," she echoes, holding her pinky finger out to me. I loop mine with hers and allow myself a slight smile.