“When did you know you were in love?”
I didn’t have an answer to that question. There hadn’t been one specific moment. It was like gradually waking up. You go from being asleep to the space between dreaming and awake and then into consciousness. It’s a slow process, but when you’re awake, there’s no mistaking it. There was no mistaking that it had been love.
But I wasn’t going to say that to Agnes. “I don’t know, it just happened.”
She looked at me, waiting for me to go on.
“You have one more question,” I said.
“Are you in love with me?”
Like I said, this girl was really good at catching me off guard. I didn’t know what to say. Because the answer was no. “Um…”
Her face fell, and then she tried to sound upbeat as she said, “So no, huh?”
“Well, are you in love with me?”
“I could be. If I let myself, I think I could be.”
“Oh.” I felt like a piece of shit. “I really do like you, Agnes.”
“I know. I can feel that that’s true. You’re an honest guy, Conrad. But you don’t let people in. It’s impossible to get close to you.” She tried to put her hair in a ponytail, but the front pieces kept falling out because it was so short. Then she released her hair and said, “I think you still love that other girl, at least a little bit. Am I right?”
“No,” I told Belly.
“I don’t believe you,” she said, tilting her head to one side. Teasingly, she said, “If there wasn’t a girl, why would you stay away for so long? There has to be a girl.”
There was.
I’d stayed away for two years. I had to. I knew I shouldn’t even be at the summer house, because being there, being near her, I would just want what I couldn’t have. It was dangerous. She was the one person I didn’t trust myself around. The day she showed up with Jere, I called my friend Danny to see if I could crash on his couch for a while, and he’d said yes. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t leave.
I knew I had to be careful. I had to keep my distance.If she knew how much I still cared, it was all over. I wouldn’t be able to walk away again. The first time was hard enough.
The promises you make on your mother’s deathbed are promises that are absolute; they’re titanium. There’s no way you’re breaking them. I promised my mother that I would take care of my brother. That I would look after him. I kept my word. I did it the best way I could. By leaving.
I might have been a fuckup and a failure and a disappointment, but I wasn’t a liar.
I did lie to Belly, though. Just that one time in that crappy motel. I did it to protect her. That’s what I kept telling myself. Still, if there was one moment in my life I could redo, one moment out of all the shitty moments, that was the one I’d pick. When I thought back to the look on her face—the way it just crumpled, how she’d sucked in her lips and wrinkled her nose to keep the hurt from showing—it killed me. God, if I could, I’d go back to that moment and say all the right things, I’d tell her I loved her, I’d make it so that she never looked that way again.
chapterthirty-three
CONRAD
That night in the motel, I didn’t sleep. I went over and over everything that had ever happened between us. I couldn’t keep doing it, going back and forth, holding her close and then pushing her away. It wasn’t right.
When Belly got up to shower around dawn, Jere and I got up too. I was folding my blanket up when I said, “It’s okay if you like her.”
Jere stared at me, his mouth hanging open. “What are you talking about?”
I felt like I was choking as I said, “It’s okay with me… if you want to be with her.”
He looked at me like I was crazy. I felt like I’d gone crazy. I heard the water in the shower shut off, and I turned away from him and said, “Just take care of her.”
And then, when she came out, dressed, her hair wet,she looked at me with those hopeful eyes, and I looked back at her like I didn’t recognize her. Completely blank. I saw her eyes dim. I saw her love for me die. I’d killed it.
When I thought about it now, that moment in the motel, I understood I was the one who’d set this thing in motion. Pushed them together. It was my doing. I was the one who was going to have to live with it. They were happy.
I’d been doing a pretty good job of making myself scarce, but I happened to be home that Friday afternoon when, out of nowhere, Belly needed me. She was sitting on the living room floor with that stupid binder, papers all around her. She looked freaked out, stressed. She had that worried grimace on her face, the look she’d get when she was working on a math problem and she couldn’t figure it out.
