Hailey
It felt like one of those mornings—one of those beautiful beginnings of a day that start out post-card-perfect before things go terribly wrong. From the lulling quiet of Georgia’s barn, to the warmth of Caleb’s skin, the grace in a moment like this grated away at my conscience.
The thrill and terror of last night numbed underneath the fear of familiarity. The fear of infinitely reliving that morning, a day that started out just like this one, deceptively peaceful.
On a morning like this, my Mom left. Actually left.
We'd had hundreds of conversations on car rides to school about how she was going to leave—how she was creatively stifled, because she was emotionally stifled, because Dad had become stifling the second he got a seat in the Senate.
I didn't even know what stifling meant at the time. I thought about googling it, but never did ‘cause I didn't want to know. It felt like a bad thing, so I left the definition to chance, and hoped to God that "stifling" wasn't a synonym for separation. The problem with my dad was, he just wasn't good at being a husband. He wasn’t even good at being a dad.
Mom said he was better "before", before the whole politics game drove him crazy, before he started loving work more than he did her or me—the famous "before". Mom liked to say that he really did love me; he just didn't show it properly.
Apparently he used to when I was a baby, but seeing as most people don’t remember the first few years of their lives, hearing that didn't provide much comfort. But she remembered a time when they loved each other enough to have me, enough to start a life together, and the absence of that wore her down to watercolors.
That morning, I'd been pretending to be asleep, pretending that I hadn't been up half the night listening to their last argument instead of studying. They shouted through the walls till the sun came up.
Never mind my grades.
Never mind my sanity.
They never cared to stop, and the colonial-era-crappy walls just amplified their problems. There was no quiet place to escape to in that house. Every fight, every raised voice, every breakdown was audible everywhere.
Mom came in and she wasn't crying, but she had so much concealer under her eyes that I could tell she had been. And I knew. She didn't have to say anything to me, ‘cause she had that look parents give you when they know they're going to break your heart but are too selfish to stop themselves. That, and her suitcases were jam-packed at the top of the stairs.
She walked over to my bed and sat down, like sitting down would somehow make me feel better, and said, "Your Dad's arranged for a driver to take you to school this morning. It'll only be for a little while, I'll be back when him and I can figure things out."
She never came back. Dad never drove me to school after that, and my driver got so used to me crying in the back of his Lincoln that he stocked up on tissues at the end of every week.
So it went.
When my resentment for my Mom dissolved into loneliness and paled in comparison to dealing with a detached, workaholic father, I called her and we decided to spend the summers together.
Every summer except this one. This one was Caleb's. For another forty-eight hours at least, and I hated every minute the sun rose higher over the mountains to remind me. Mornings like these were beginnings and endings all rolled into a sunrise, and I've never been good with endings, especially ones I can't control.
I stared out at the country quiet, watching the fog burn off the grass a section at a time, like the ground was unveiling its seven o’clock secrets. Caleb was still asleep and snoring open-mouthed, not enough to be embarrassed about, but enough for me to it find endearing.
He'd been out of this world the last couple of days. Last night had been unforgettably awesome and painful and heartbreaking all at once, and I woke up in knots, not knowing how to untie myself from the confusion or if I was supposed to try. I just wanted to exist like this for a little while, to bundle back up in his blanket, and cement myself to a moment I wasn't supposed to want.
But I'd gotten a little too used to being away from home, from being lost in the middle of somewhere beautiful and unexpected. But sitting there, taking in the morning next to a person I probably loved, I tried my best not to expect too much of anything.
I slipped back into my t-shirt as quietly as I could, hoping to escape to somewhere I could think a little more clearly, but Caleb caught me before my arms made it through the sleeves.
"You know, if you're cold, there's a warm place for you right here."
He tapped his fingers against his chest, and in less than seconds the boy who'd charmed me out of my clothes, had me lying not so innocently against him, staring up at the ceiling under the cover of his arms and a homemade quilt. This might've been a good morning, even a great one, if we didn't have people to run from or places to run to.
"So, you promised me a follow up," I said, savoring the still awkward comfortability in flirting more than I was used to.
"I did?"
"You did. How'd I do?"
Caleb shifted up onto his elbows and looked down at me so intensely I thought we'd find ourselves in trouble all over again.
"It was fun. Let's do it again sometime."
"Sometime" sounded a lot like, "right now", but I held it together—as together as a person can be when pinned under a blue-eyed hurricane.
"You think Georgia's up?" I asked.
"Seriously, Hailey?"
"Seriously. It's after six."
Caleb slid his hands very subtly around my waist, his fingers grazing just enough of my skin to kill the conversation.
"I told her to sleep in. She invited us for breakfast later, but that's later," he said, his lips dissolving against my neck like warm sugar.
I held my breath to keep quiet. If he knew he was getting somewhere, he'd go all the way, so I stuck to the Cosmo mantra I thought I'd never use, and "made him wait".
"I could go for breakfast," I said, sitting up as gently as I could to keep from rattling any of his injuries to life. He looked injured regardless.
"And I could go for something else, but if you wanna eat. Let's eat."
Ten-year-old Caleb made a second appearance, but if I hadn't left the bed right then I don't think I would've. I didn't want to go home, I didn't even want to say goodbye to Georgia, but sticking around here too long meant trouble and that was enough to keep me on my toes.
Caleb didn't put up much of a fight on the trek back to the house. He kicked a lot of rocks, grumbled to himself for the first few minutes, but cooled off and held my hand, letting his disappointment disappear along with our footsteps in the grass.
"You ever think about getting married, Hailey?"
"What?"
"I don't know, I was just wonderin’. Besides, my Ma used to tell me to start thinking about it after, well, you know."
Caleb cheeks lit up like a hot plate. Only a country boy would say something that complicated so simply. I liked him even more for it.
"Not really. It kinda scares me to be honest."
"I guess that's a ‘no’ then," he said.
"Was that a proposal?"
"An imaginary one. I had everything planned out too. We could buy that barn from Georgia, get married in the front yard, invite your mom, and I'll think about telling my dad. We can have a couple kids, or kidnap somebody else’s, and then the cops can come and arrest us when we’re 80. It was gonna be pretty neat."
I can't remember the point where I stopped listening and started laughing, but once I started, I kept at it for so long I thought I'd split apart at the heartstrings. I laughed so hard that after a while I blurred the lines between cracking up and crying.
And eventually I was crying, ‘cause I knew some part of me wanted him to be serious, and that some part of him was, and that every part of me understood that expecting the impossible was impossibly stupid.
So I cried. Head-to-the-sky-heart-heaving cried.
And I didn't care that Caleb was watching, just that he was there. I cried about my hair, and Georgia, and last night, until my eyes went dry. But for the first time, it felt good.
For the first time, I felt okay about being sad instead of not okay about hiding it, and Caleb seemed okay with it too.
"You really are hungry, huh? I better tell Georgia to double up on the grits," he said.
Even after sticking out another one of my typhoons, Caleb managed to tease out a smile. I didn't say anything to him for the rest of the walk to Georgia's, just leaned into the infinite space underneath his arm and listened to the grass crunch and crumble beneath our shoes.
A cop car was parked in Georgia's driveway, and the black and white brush with reality sucked the air right out of my lungs. The fog hadn't burned away enough for either of us to have spotted it from the field, but up close it was clear as day and burnt out the bravery in our blood.
Georgia's front door creaked open and she waved us inside for breakfast like there was nothing wrong. Like a cop being there wasn't a problem. Caleb's hand tensed up when he saw her. I thought he'd run, or try to hide us somewhere, but he b-lined for Georgia, looking angry enough to punch holes through her front porch.
"You said you were alright with us, Georgia. You said a whole lotta bull—“
"Young man, you better calm down before you say somethin' you regret."
"You're a liar, Georgia Jane. You're a damn liar."
"And you're late and stupid. Come on inside. I need to talk to the both of y'all. It’s alright.”
I wanted to believe she was still the same old genuine Georgia we'd come to know her to be. But the second we stepped into the house, my hope ran dry. The very same thick-southern-accented cop I'd heard outside of her truck was sitting at the head of the dining table.