How to End a Love Story(76)
So Grant left and drove to the old pizza shop up the mountain, because he didn’t want to go home and tell Dad he’d been right about the funeral. He remembers wondering what became of the man (not Dad) who had stood with him reassuringly while the police questioned him at the scene. That man disappeared at some point, and Grant never saw him again.
He remembers the smell of warm olive oil and dough in the air as he ordered a slice of pepperoni pizza with a can of Coke. He remembers the pretty redhead behind the counter smiling at him, and then hearing his name—“Grant?”—and turning to see Kevin Palermo, sitting with other graduating seniors from the football team.
“Good to see you here, man,” Kevin said. “It’s been a minute.”
Grant hadn’t seen any of them since the party at Brianna Peltzer’s house, the stupid party he shouldn’t have gone to.
“I’m sorry,” Grant said, and the lump in his throat seemed ready to choke him.
“Grab a slice with us while you wait for yours,” Kevin said, and stood so the others could shuffle to make room behind him. Grant still isn’t sure if Kevin was being nice or oblivious when he said it—you’ve met him, he’s always been like that. “Hey, you hear they made frickin’ Tommy Hariri team captain next year? Those poor freshmen.”
“Tommy Hariri,” Grant remembers saying, and sitting down as if Michelle Zhang, beloved daughter, sister, friend, wasn’t being lowered into the ground a few short miles away. “No way.”
“Way,” Kevin said.
Grant remembers discovering he had a terrible new power that day in the pizza shop.
That he could get away with killing someone and everyone would still treat him the same as always, as if he hadn’t done it at all.
Twenty-Four
“I’m sorry,” Grant gasps, and his breathing becomes erratic again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I wish . . . I wish—”
He can’t seem to finish his sentences and Helen thinks of all the times she wondered (all the while wishing she didn’t), what was it like for you, afterward, all the times she briefly allowed the next thought, it must have been terrible, and the guilt, and the resentment, and the anger, and the present pain turning into the past hurt over and over again until her insistent heart beat out a never-ending rhythm of hurtpainhurtpainhurtpain. She’s spent a good fraction of her good fortune on therapy, training that terrible recurring poem of her heart to dull its thud, enough so she can hear her own thoughts over it, enough so she can think about something other than her still-beating organs.
She suspects she always imagined some version of this for him too—an echo of her own emotional scars, whenever she imagined what was it like for you. But seeing it, feeling it, from his cold skin to her not-cold-enough heart, is so awfully different.
Helen slips out of her shoes. She stands and slowly resettles herself above him, one knee on the inside of the couch, the other dangling above the floor.
“Would you hold me?” she asks, and after a beat, he nods.
She drops down more fully, her legs stretching over his, her body covering his body like a weighted blanket as his arms come around her. She is suddenly, bizarrely grateful that she can give this to him, that maybe she’s the only person in the world who can.
“I think I forgave you long before I ever forgave her,” she murmurs finally. “I still haven’t, really. I don’t know if I ever will.”
“You shouldn’t forgive me,” Grant says. “It’s not . . . you shouldn’t be mad at your sister forever. That’s not how it should be.”
“It’s how we left it,” Helen says. “We were supposed to grow up and get over ourselves and meet on the other side of the mountain as friends. Closer than friends—I see old classmates hanging out with siblings they grew up with and I wish I had thirteen more years of memories, I wish I’d said something else in that last moment, or she’d said something else, and I wish—I wish she’d wanted to live more than she wanted to die in that final instant. I wish I could tell her what a dick move the last thing she ever did was, and I wish she could respond. Anyway, it’s not your fault. I don’t blame you for any of it, Grant Shepard.”
She listens to his heartbeat slow down as she draws slow circles on his chest. She thinks he might be drifting off to sleep, when he mumbles, “I’m sorry I need this so much. I wish I didn’t.”
Don’t be sorry, she thinks, a little desperately. I want you to need me.
When she looks up, his eyes are closed. She isn’t sure why her heart feels like it’s breaking, when it hasn’t been working properly in years anyway.
Grant wakes up and it’s afternoon, and he hears a reassuring, soft click-clack of Helen working on her laptop behind his desk.
“How long was I out?” he asks grimly.
“A few hours,” she answers. “It’s almost one thirty.”
He sits up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Embarrassment too. If he looks up and she’s looking back at him with pitying eyes, he’ll get in his car and drive to Canada.
“I think you should buy us lunch,” Helen says, still typing. “Or we could go somewhere.”
“It’s your turn to pick lunch,” he says.