Sam shook Kelsey’s hand. Then he leaned closer and said, “I know you don’t mean any harm, but you know what you have to do. Bye, now. We’ll meet again.”
“I know,” Kelsey said, trying to put on a firm smile. “Bye, Sam.”
Finally, they were alone. Peter had been silent and sullen since they woke up, and now was no different. He gave her a sad smile, glancing anxiously at the screen. If she wanted to tell him in person, it would be now, or never.
She braced herself, and let go of his hands.
“I have something to tell you, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to say it.”
In response, he put his hands on either side of her face, and tilted her head toward his. Then he kissed her, longer and slower than he had ever kissed her before.
“I have something to tell you, too, but I don’t have the time,” he said, his mouth next to her neck, sending shivers through her body. “When I get home from Afghanistan, we’ll have all the time we want. We’ll have a surplus of time. We’ll have so much time, we’ll forget we were ever apart. I’ll drive you around and we’ll say everything we want to say. Because—yeah. I have so, so much that I want to say to you.”
Kelsey hadn’t allowed herself to picture such a fiction, the two of them in Kansas, in the summer, free to do what they wanted. What Peter saw was never going to happen, and for some reason, that part of the truth made her saddest. She couldn’t bear to face it. At that moment, it wasn’t nerves stopping her, it was the fear of destroying what they had made. The time they had spent together hadn’t been completely right, but they had spent it all the same.
She squeezed his hands, kissing them briefly as she brought them down from her face.
“Good-bye,” she said, and tried not to look at him as she turned to walk away.
When she gave the flight attendant her boarding pass, she was surprised to find tears had been running down her cheeks, quiet, unhindered, and they didn’t stop when she took her seat at the window, gazing out at the horizon, toward where Peter would be, until clouds spilled out from under the plane.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Exactly three days had passed since Kelsey had driven home from the airport, walked across her lawn, through her front door, past her parents, and up into her room to shut the door. Except for intermittent trips to the kitchen, the door had remained shut. Her phone remained off. School was on break, therefore Kelsey had no reason to leave her cocoon of blankets, pillows, and disgustingly rich housewives making fools of themselves on national television.
What was the use of bringing herself out into a universe of more confusion? She had been sucking up the air for seventeen years, and in that time, she had managed to lose a sister and a best friend, and she was on the brink of losing the only person who made her feel like all of it would be all right.
No need to change out of her tank top and sweatpants, which were beginning to smell like barbecue potato chips. No need to expose herself to the outside world. Seventeen years was enough.
She emerged from her room on the lookout for her parents. They were downstairs. She crossed into Michelle’s room and opened the closet, reaching to the top shelf, beyond the notebooks and markers and brushes, until her fingers brushed the box.
Michelle’s secret stash: Marlboro 27s and a unicorn lighter. Probably stale by now, but Kelsey was glad her mother hadn’t found them.
Kelsey rarely had a cigarette, but when Michelle was feeling down after a breakup, Kelsey had accompanied her to their porch to watch her blow out smoke and cry. Most of the time, especially as they got older, she had only come outside to judge her sister. To tell her she was asking for it, falling in and out of love so quickly. That she shouldn’t smoke, that she was killing herself.
Now Kelsey was opening the screen door to light one up, Michelle gone.
She had always said it helped her calm down.
It helps me think.
The memory of Michelle, diffused in the misty afternoon smoke, joined her.
I can’t do it.
She had gone halfway across the world to tell Peter that Michelle was dead, but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bear to tear him up, but it was more than that. She could have sat him down at the airport, and let the facts do their job. But she didn’t.
I just don’t want it to be true.
That was it. The myth would be over. Michelle would be over. She stared at the smoke as it curled around her hand, down through the rungs on her sister’s porch. She thought of all the conversations they had here, and then she realized: Michelle didn’t have to die again.
Kelsey may not have had the courage to tell Peter the truth, but lord knows she had spent enough time on this very porch, listening to Michelle fall out of love. If Kelsey couldn’t push Peter away, then Michelle could. She would tell him she had met someone else: a fry cook at Burger Stand. A DJ at the Taproom. She would hang up on him, refuse to write him, whatever it took. She would make him angry, which would force him to do something she could never do: move on.
When she flicked the finished Marlboro over the wooden railing, she returned inside through her side of the porch, spraying herself with Chloe perfume to hide the smell.
She grabbed Michelle’s laptop from under the bed, slipped on a jacket, and put her bare feet into her boots.
“Where are you off to?” her mother called as she passed her in the living room.
“Fresh air,” Kelsey replied.
She walked the two blocks to Central Park, named haphazardly by the city of Lawrence after the park in New York City, but twenty times less its size. When she arrived, she sat on a bench near the community center, where she could pick up Wi-Fi, and opened the laptop. There she waited, hoping the battery would keep until Peter saw her online. He had told her on their last night in Paris that he was supposed to return from a mission today.
When his Skype icon turned green, Kelsey wasted no time.
“Hi, Peter,” she said when he answered her call. His video was still loading. “Are you there?”
“I’m here,” he replied, but when his image appeared, he didn’t look like the Peter she knew in Paris. Dark circles had returned to his eyes, which were bloodshot, the clear blue clouded over.
“What’s wrong?”
“Can’t tell you,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“You have to tell me,” Kelsey said, swallowing. She was finding it difficult to be as numb as she had been determined to be. She was finding it difficult not to cry herself at the sight of his distress. He had become her best friend after all.
Peter looked behind him, making sure no one had followed. Then he grabbed a notebook and pen, scribbled something on the paper, paused, and scribbled more.
Our company lost 2 men on the way back from a mission, the paper read, and when Kelsey saw the name written underneath, she held a hand to her head, pulling her hair until it hurt.
Sam.
“No.”
Peter nodded. He looked away to compose himself.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, but she knew it wasn’t enough.
She wished she could tell him she knew how it felt to lose someone so close, and nothing anyone says can change the stripped, punched-in-the-gut feeling. She was stabbed by guilt, knowing Sam had died keeping her secret.
“His truck hit a mine,” Peter said, his voice low. “Right in front of ours.”
At that, he put his head in his hands, and let out a string of curses. Words she had never heard Peter use before, unintelligible, a broken language.