Meanwhile, things with Tug were getting serious. The distant, reserved man she’d first met was changing under her gaze. He smiled often, and there was one particular laugh that came out only when the two of them were alone; it made her laugh too, in a burst of happiness all the more intense for being private, a language they had invented and spoke only together.
On her birthday, he took her to a dark, noisy Greek restaurant in the north end, where they sat cramped in a back corner and drank harsh red wine and ate grilled octopus and lamb. His cheeks flushed, Tug told her a long story about a childhood friend of his who’d been a jumper — off tree branches, then train trestles and buildings — and never got injured, no matter the height. “It was impossible,” Tug said, shaking his head, “but he always survived.”
“Crazy,” Grace said, smiling.
His hand was on hers across the table. He had also survived.
Every once in a while she tried to get him to talk about that day on the mountain, and he wasn’t evasive so much as shallow. He’d say, “I was unhappy, Grace,” and leave it at that. She’d ask a few more questions, trying to edge deeper, and he met each of them with a one-sentence answer.
The longer he refused to discuss it, the more she wondered about it, picking at the mysterious scab. Of course she wanted to know just what, exactly, had brought him to such a dark place. He was relatively forthcoming about his divorce. His ex-wife was living in Hudson with her parents. They had been together four years, but were very different people, and though it was sad, it was no huge surprise that things hadn’t worked out. It didn’t sound like a lie, only a flat, simple version of the truth. As for his professional life, he talked about working in Switzerland for UNESCO, which he made sound boring and bureaucratic. He had had enough of it. He wouldn’t work in the stationery store forever, of course; he was just taking a little time off to decide what came next.
He had similarly specific yet terse answers for her questions about his financial situation, his time in treatment, his relationship with his family. Trying to find out more, she felt like she was hammering endlessly on the same reluctant nail.
Tug, however, had few questions for her. She suspected this wasn’t because he didn’t care, but because he knew it would make their conversations lopsided. If he didn’t ask very many, then she would seem like an inquisitor. It worked; she stopped asking.
But the questions didn’t disappear; they just lodged deeper in her consciousness. She knew, in fact, only the broadest outlines of his life: where he’d gone to school, that he’d married and worked abroad. His inner life was hidden behind a curtain, on a secret stage. The gap between what he said and what she didn’t know swelled between them like a bubble that kept expanding; sometimes, when she reached out her arms to hold him, the bubble felt like all she could touch.
On a Thursday afternoon, during what had been Annie Hardwick’s reserved slot, Grace was catching up on some paperwork. She hadn’t yet granted this appointed time to someone else, but the next week she would. This was one of the papers she was looking at — the schedule. Then, to her surprise, there was a knock on the door, and Annie stepped inside.
“Hi,” she said, and smiled.
She looked prettier, less coltish, and her braces had been removed. She took off her winter coat and threw it on the couch, revealing a low-cut sweater and jeans instead of her usual school uniform. Her posture was straight and confident, and clearly she had no plans to apologize for getting Grace in trouble with her parents.
“How are you?” Grace said.
“I’m terrible,” she declared, then sat down with a flounce of blond hair. “I’m sure you’ve heard about the catastrophe. I’ve been grounded for weeks. No Ollie, no friends, no mall. My mom found my journal and just flipped. And the whole pregnancy thing? My God.”
“And how are you feeling about the whole pregnancy thing?”
“I’m feeling glad,” Annie said emphatically, “that it’s over.”
“Okay.” Grace felt like she was dealing with an entirely new creature, one who’d molted her previous adolescent skin and had become a shinier, wilder animal.
They talked for a few minutes — about schoolwork, friends, the braces coming off — before circling back to her parents and the turbulence of the past few weeks.
“So I told my teacher, Ms. Van den Berg, that I had the flu. And then I felt, like, ashamed, because lying was so easy. That’s what I never realized before, that you don’t lie, because you don’t think you can get away with it. But you’re really the only person who knows the difference.”
“That’s true, I suppose,” Grace said slowly. “Does this mean you’re not going to lie to your parents anymore?”
Annie laughed. “My parents,” she said, then sighed, shaking her head a little, as if they were her errant children and not the other way around. Something in her face softened then, and her expression grew sincere and sad. She folded her hands in her lap almost piously. “My father has a girlfriend who lives in Saint-Lambert,” she said, her voice quiet, resigned, its timbre altogether different from the bright prattle of the past minutes. “We know all about her. She used to be his secretary but now she just hangs out and he supports her. My parents were arguing about her the other night. They still think I fall asleep early, but at midnight I was just lying there listening. It sounds like she’s pregnant and having his baby. Wouldn’t that have been, like, hilarious, if she and I had had babies at the same time? What would that relationship even be?”
“I don’t know,” Grace said.
“Maybe I’d be my own aunt or something. And my mom’s threatening to have her own affair, as revenge. She’ll never leave my dad, we all know that. She’s too weak. I don’t think she’ll even have an affair. She’ll just get new prescriptions instead.”
She looked down at her hands as if in prayer. She was crying, a quick slipstream of tears that fell silently down her cheeks.
“It’s not your fault,” Grace said gently. “You can’t control any of it.”
“He used to—” she said, then stopped.
Grace waited.
“He used to come lie down with me at night and say I was his special girl. He doesn’t do it anymore.” Now she was crying harder, her shoulders shaking, snot cresting at her nose.
Grace gave her a tissue. “Tell me more about that.”
“No,” Annie said. “No.” When she lifted her face and wiped her eyes, she looked calmer and harder, and her facade reassembled itself like a sliding door closing across her features. The fact that there were cracks in her self-presentation, that she evidently had to work so hard to construct a mask of indifference, made her success at it that much more pitiable to Grace. She was practicing the skill of keeping others at a distance, and the older she got the more proficient she would likely become, at a cost borne mainly by herself.
“Annie,” Grace said firmly, “you’re sixteen. Soon you’ll be an adult.”
“Meaning what?” the girl demanded.
“You can be anything you want to be,” Grace said. “You don’t have to be like them.”
To her surprise, Annie smiled. She wiped her cheeks clean, smearing snot and makeup on the sleeve of her sweater. She seemed more immediately comforted by this thought than Grace had expected. “You know what, you’re right,” she said, suddenly standing up. “You’re totally and completely right.”
Grace’s stomach turned over. When a patient agreed so quickly, it was rarely a good sign. “Let’s talk about what this would mean for you, specifically,” she said.
“No, I think I’m good,” Annie said. Still smiling, she picked up her coat, and indeed she was radiant, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright. At the door she turned around and said, “Thank you, Grace. You’ve been a huge help.”