Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere #3)

WHEN I’D called Will from the airport to tell him I was coming, his reaction had made every moment I’d spent angsting about accepting Milton’s frequent miles worth it. “You’re really coming?” he’d said, and though he’d tried to play it off like it wasn’t necessary, he’d sounded… lighter. When I’d hung up to board the plane, he’d simply said, “thanks.” But that one word had been freighted with such relief that I’d grinned all the way to my seat.

I’d clung to it on the flight, too, focusing on how I was going to help Will rather than letting myself sink into the murk of what precisely our relationship was, or where exactly we stood. I told myself that this didn’t necessarily mean something; it just was. I congratulated myself because the sentiment seemed to fit with Tonya’s yoga teachings about being present and appreciating a thing for itself, and then immediately side-eyed myself because congratulating yourself for being present wasn’t very… present. Thank god it was a short flight.

The cab dropped me off in a part of Holiday I’d never been to before, which was saying something, given its size. Will’s sister’s place was a small prefab with a big yard and a mailbox in the shape of a dalmatian.

I could hear the yelling even before I got out of the taxi. One of the voices was definitely Will’s and I assumed the other was Claire’s. Well, at least she was out of the hospital, anyway.

“Good luck, kid,” the driver said to me. “My parents are a nightmare too.”

I didn’t want to walk into the middle of whatever battle they were having, but it was freezing out, so I knocked tentatively. There was no way they could hear me over the yelling, so I tried the door and, finding it unlocked, went inside. The house was spotless, and there was very little in it. Furniture and basic necessities but no décor, no art, no clutter. Nothing that suggested three people lived here.

I followed the noise and found Will in the kitchen, facing off with one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, and now that I’d been in New York for a while, I’d seen a lot. She looked like Will—the clean line of jaw and nose, the high cheekbones and clear brow. But where his beauty could be remote and otherworldly, hers was warm and inviting. She was curvy where he was spare. Her eyes were a darker, brighter blue, and her mouth naturally turned up at the corners. She had dimples and her two front teeth overlapped charmingly, making her seem approachable. Her blonde hair was a shade darker than Will’s—a warm honey color that made me want to run my fingers through its smooth thickness.

If Will was the untouchable statue, Claire was vibrant and alive. The girl you were desperate to talk to, desperate to have smile at you. Even like this, her face twisted in anger and her eyes blazing, I immediately wanted her to like me.

When she saw me, she jerked backward, hand to her chest.

“Jesus Christ, you almost gave me a fucking heart attack,” she said. Even her voice was attractive, smooth and low.

“Sorry! Sorry, I knocked, but….”

When Will turned to me, I was shocked. He looked utterly exhausted. But when I smiled at him and he smiled back, there was some kind of, like, light in his face. And I’d put it there.

“Hey,” he said. “Claire, Leo. Leo, Claire.”

“Ah,” Claire said, her eyes narrowing in a gaze startlingly like Will’s. “Skater boy.”

“Sis,” Will said in a tone I could tell was used between them often.

Wait. She knew who I was. That meant Will had totally talked about me to her! I wondered what he had said, and I was about to ask Claire but bit my tongue since it was clearly not the time.

Before I had a chance to say anything anyway, they were at it again. I didn’t have the background to make sense of all the details, but the gist of it seemed to be that Will was insisting that Claire see a certain doctor and Claire was refusing. There were a lot of references to past incidents, and a lot more yelling. Finally, Will grabbed Claire’s shoulders and stuck his face in hers.

“You’re going, and that’s final!”

“You’re not fucking in charge of me!”

“I am, actually. Or did you forget about that too, the way you forgot about your kids for days?”

That stopped Claire dead. Her glare turned her face cold, and she and Will could’ve been twins.

“I really hate you sometimes,” she said, low and serious.

I saw her words land, and I saw Will absorb them, taking the hit with a barely perceptible jump in the muscle of his jaw and a clench of his fists where they hung at his sides.

“Yeah,” he said, voice thick. “I know. But you’re still going.”

Claire slumped a bit, her spine softening.

Will clearly saw an opening and took it, grabbing his bag from the kitchen table and shrugging into his coat.

“Okay, we’re taking off, then.” He hesitated, chin down. “You sure you don’t want us to stay here?”

“I told you I was, Willy,” Claire said in a singsong voice that sounded almost eerie after her anger of a moment before, like cheery carnival music played over an ominous scene in a scary movie.

“Do not fucking call me that, Claire Bear,” Will retorted.

She just raised her eyebrows at him mockingly.

“That’s Clairevoyant to you, Willful,” she said, pinching his cheek.

“I’m too tired to even mock you properly right now. Your children are a fucking handful.”

Claire’s smile faded away. “What, you’d rather they were not seen and not heard the way we were?”

Will stared at his feet. I’d never seen him look like that before. Defeated and ashamed. “No, of course not. Okay, well. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Claire walked us to the door and pulled Will down into a fierce hug, twining her arms around his neck and jumping up to wrap her legs around his waist.

“Thanks, little bro. You’re always the white hat,” she said.

“Your sister’s….” I started to say as we got into Will’s rental car, but I couldn’t think how to finish the sentence so I just let it drop. Will didn’t seem much in the mood to make conversation anyway.

He’d been staying at Claire’s with Nathan and Sarah while she was in the hospital, but now that she was home we were going to stay at Rex’s cabin. Since Rex owned it outright, he and Daniel had decided to keep it in the hopes of visiting there sometimes. That’s what Rex said, anyway. I got the sense that Daniel was comforted by the idea of keeping all their options open in case the Temple job didn’t work out. Or (unspoken always, but clearly a fear of his) in case they didn’t work out.

We drove in silence, the back of Will’s right hand resting lazily on his knee so he was steering with two fingers, his left elbow propped against the window. It was how he always drove, all the power and speed of a ton of metal and mechanics controlled by the touch of two fingertips.

We’d driven this route often when he’d been in Holiday, since I couldn’t skateboard on the dirt roads strewn with pine needles that led to Rex’s cabin. The first time I’d ridden in the car with him, I was so nervous I couldn’t stop babbling about nothing, bouncing my knees and running curious fingers along parts of the car’s interior just to be doing something, interacting with an extension of Will in some way.

Now, I sat still and silent as the familiar streets of Holiday branched out around us. How could someplace I’d lived my whole life feel so foreign?

How could Will feel the most like home of anything in Holiday?

The cabin revealed itself through the pine boughs, and I felt a rush of longing that Daniel and Rex would be inside when we opened the door, Marilyn trotting up to greet us. Daniel would be sitting at the table, papers strewn out around him, a pained expression on his face and one of Rex’s mom’s old records playing in the background.

Rex would be in the kitchen making dinner and, every now and then, coming up behind Daniel and squeezing his shoulders or running a hand through his hair. Daniel would lean back, press his head to Rex’s stomach, maybe tilt his head back for a kiss. When we’d walk in, Daniel would gesture helplessly at his stack of papers as if one of us could explain why his students tortured him by not writing better essays, and Rex would raise his eyebrows at us slightly, and usher us into the kitchen so we could keep him company as he cooked. He’d cast a glance back at Daniel before following us, affection clear on his face even if Daniel never looked up.

But it was dark and silent, just the bones of the life that was once lived there.

Will made a fire and turned on the heat as I brought our bags inside. Daniel and Rex hadn’t gotten around to getting more furniture for the cabin yet, so all that was left in the living room was the plaid couch and a card table, and in the bedroom an uninflated air mattress and linens.

The first time I’d come here it struck me as everything that a home should be. The best combination of comfortable and functional, warm and spare.

Now, though, where I really wanted to be was at Will’s apartment. Surrounded by Will’s drafting table and seemingly unending supply of pencils, his five hundred white T-shirts and coffee-table books that weren’t on the coffee table. His sweaters and soft sheets and shampoo that all smelled like him. And the small spaces that I thought of as mine: the desk next to Will’s drafting table where I studied, the corner of the counter where I always leaned while he made coffee, the left side of the bed.

Fire made, Will and I stood awkwardly, facing each other.

“Can we…?” He held his arms out tentatively, and I went into them like they were gravity.

If I’d thought his touch would have lost its power I was wrong. I softened against him, and he melted into me too. We kept each other upright, two masses exerting equal force on one another. He held me so close, squeezed me so tight, held on for so long, that when we separated it felt like being torn apart.

I could feel his warmth even when he wasn’t touching me, like a slight electrical charge in the places between us.

We ordered pizza and slumped onto the couch, neither of us speaking.

“I can’t believe you came here,” Will finally muttered. “You didn’t have to do that.”

He fidgeted for a minute, then grabbed a piece of pizza and shoved it in his mouth like he was trying to keep himself from saying anything else. I studied him, conducting an experiment. Trying to figure out if, after everything, Will still had as much power over me as ever.

Everything about him still called out to me, the distance between us practically painful. But there was a fragility about the moment that stopped me from touching him. What would he do if I closed it? What would it do to me?

I shook my head and took a page out of Will’s playbook, snagging a slice of pizza for myself.

“Um, how’s your sister?”

Will sighed heavily, clearly exhausted.

“No permanent damage from the dehydration or… anything else she got up to when she was away. She won’t say where she was or what she was doing.” He shrugged. “So, it could be worse.” But he didn’t look comforted. He attacked another piece of pizza. Out of habit, he folded it the way he did New York–style pizza, but that just made the fat slice’s cheese bunch up and sauce drip out the sides, splatting onto Will’s knee.

“Is something else going on? You seem super freaked. I mean, not that you shouldn’t be anyway, just, like, extra freaked.”

He scraped the sauce off his jeans and kept eating, mindlessly. When he swallowed the last mouthful of crust, he cleared his throat.

“Usually the kids are good about acting normal at school. But I guess, uh, Sarah’s teacher noticed that she was real jumpy and called the house to talk to Claire, but she wasn’t there so she called CPS.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah. And it’s not the first time, which means—well, I’m not sure what will happen, exactly. I’m not sure what… should happen.”

“Do you want… I mean, do you think it would be better if CPS took Nathan and Sarah away?”

“No. Well, some things might be better, but… you know this town. No way would they get to stay here; Holiday doesn’t have the resources or the population. And they’d end up getting split up if they got placed with anyone. It’s not ideal. But obviously neither is life with Claire.”

“What’s going to happen this time, do you think?”

He shook his head again. “I don’t know. Most likely? Probably nothing.”

“What? How can that be? They must take stuff like this seriously, right? I mean, no offense to your sister who seems super nice and all, but she went off and left her kids alone for days.”

“Well, I’m not sure. But…. Okay, people look at Claire and they see a beautiful, vibrant woman with cute kids. She’s charming and outgoing and everyone she meets likes her. I’ve seen her talk her way out of every mess she’s ever gotten herself into, so the good money’s on this time not being any different.”

I couldn’t believe that they’d really do nothing. Surely an official body like CPS wouldn’t care about something as superficial as Claire’s charm. As if he could sense my doubt, Will started listing examples.

“When she was twenty, Claire got caught breaking into the middle school and stealing a television set from the media room. The security guard never even called the police because she started talking to him and flirting with him. After an hour, he had her phone number and she walked out. The first time she got busted with drugs she talked her way into a fancy lawyer who took her case pro bono, and she just had to pay a fine. When Nathan was little she’d drive to Kalkaska and have him go into ice-cream places where he’d ask the people who worked there for an ice cream, Claire would look all sad and apologetic and tell him they couldn’t afford it, and the people would give Nathan an ice cream for free. And one for Claire.

“And both times someone from CPS looked into things they thought everything seemed fine. The kids obviously weren’t dirty or hungry. If they asked about her erratic behavior, Claire would talk sincerely about how hard it was sometimes as a young single mom to maintain a sense of freedom. When it was a female caseworker, she talked about how society tells mothers that they aren’t allowed to want things for themselves anymore. When it was a male caseworker she told stories about how aggressively going after her career goals was a good example to set for her kids. Would that shit play in New York? No way. But here? Mostly these are people who are just as desperate for excitement as everyone else. They see Claire, beautiful and having fun, and they see what they wish their lives were like.”

Will reached out and took my hand, sliding his fingers through mine without a thought.

“And it’s not just CPS,” he went on with a sigh. “It’s doctors and shrinks and… fuck. I know I probably sound paranoid as hell. But there are pictures that people have in their minds of what mental health issues look like. And Claire is not that picture. I know it’s not all about how she looks. It’s also about how she presents herself. How fucking sad this town is that they’d rather buy into the romance of Claire’s manic shit being her having adventures or living her dreams or whatever than see it for what it is. No one believes she has a problem.”

He took a deep breath like he was trying to reset.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be different this time because she was actually in the hospital. She has to go back for some follow-up blood tests.”

“Would they believe you if you told them about how stuff is?”

“And be responsible for Sarah and Nathan maybe getting taken away from their home and their friends and the mom who really fucking loves them and does right by them a hell of a lot more of the time than our parents ever did right by us, and who also, oh yeah, happens to be my sister? Yeah. No.”

Will went to run a hand through his hair and noticed for the first time that he was holding mine. I could see the surprise on his face, but I just gave him a small smile to tell him it was okay.

“And there’s no one else who could step in when Claire’s not… fit? A neighbor or a friend. Or maybe like one of Sarah or Nathan’s friends’ parents?”

“I… I’m not sure. I wouldn’t really trust one of them not to say anything.”

“Would you have to explain it all? Maybe Nathan and Sarah could just… know in the backs of their minds or something, like, ‘When mom is like this we go to so-and-so’s house and sleep over’?”

He hesitated, chewing on his lip. “Maybe. I don’t like asking other people to get involved in my shit.”

“I know. But sometimes people honestly do want to help.”

Will looked at me like this was a thought that had never occurred to him before.

“Like you,” he murmured, and it was half question and half acknowledgment of something that I think we’d both known for a while.

I nodded. It was enough for now.