Katie Cotugno - How to Love

I shake my head again, wishing I didn’t have to hear him. “Shelby’s never going to forgive me,” is what comes out.

“ Goddamnit , Reena,” he says, voice rising; oh, I’m making him mad. “Can you please let me in for one second? ”

“Seriously?” I demand. I feel myself get a little bigger, my shoulders broadening out. “Let you in? The whole entire time we were together I tried to get you to talk to me.”

That gets his attention. “About what?” he asks, sounding genuinely curious.

“About everything!” I tell him. “About your family, about your friends, about Allie—”

“I gave Allie the keys to her car.”

“What?” It’s so sudden I think I’ve misheard him, and when I look at his face I can tell he’s surprised himself. For a second we only just stare at each other, recalibrating, but then he takes a breath and goes on.

“The night she died.” It looks as if it’s physically painful for him to say it, as if the words taste like gravel or bone. “I had her keys. And I let her have them.”

I don’t—It feels like he’s speaking Mandarin. “But we were together the night she died,” I say, still not understanding. “At the ice cream place.”

“Before that.” Sawyer exhales, rakes his hands through his hair. All of a sudden the tenor of this conversation has changed completely, like it’s about so much more than just him and me. “Before I came to the restaurant. We were at a party with some people. Lauren and all of them. We didn’t drive together, but she gave me her keys because she didn’t want to carry a purse. She had that big stupid purse, you know?” Sawyer shrugs and heads across the patio even though it’s still raining, leaves the safe harbor of the awning for the glider at the edge of the yard. After a minute I follow.

“We were there for like an hour,” he tells me, swinging just a little, picking reflexively at the seam of his work pants. “Maybe an hour and a half. And we started to argue.”

“Okay,” I say softly. I perch beside him on the glider, same as the night just after Allie’s funeral. It makes it easier, somehow, not to have to stare him in the eye. I can hear the restaurant sounds just like I could the last time we did this, the same underwater sensation. “I’m with you so far.”

Sawyer nods. “She said she was leaving,” he continues after a minute. My heart is thudding hard behind my ribs. “She yelled at me to give her the keys, and she wasn’t—she wasn’t sloppy, you know? It wasn’t like she was falling down. But she’d had a couple beers and there was that look in her eye, and—” He breaks off all of a sudden, shrugging helplessly. He looks about ten years old. “I never, ever should have let her go. But I did. I threw her the keys and I told her to get the hell lost, if that’s how she felt about stuff, and I—”

“—and you came to the restaurant and found me.”

Sawyer nods like all the breath has gone out of him. The rain is slipping down the back of my neck. “So,” he says eventually, eyes on the other side of the courtyard; Get the hell lost , he told her, and she did. “Now you know.”

Now I know.

For a long time neither of us says anything, rain spritzing down on the pavement. I think of Sawyer carrying that secret across the country. I think of Allie dying before she ever got to live. I cry for a while, sitting there on the glider, remembering the purple ribbon I didn’t wear in the weeks after the accident, like no pretty length of grosgrain would stretch around whatever it was I’d lost. Sawyer’s arm is warm and damp against mine. “What was the fight about?” I ask him finally.

“You.” Just like that, no hesitation at all: Sawyer lifts his head to look at me, his expression wry and heartbroken and honest. “We were fighting about you.”

“Me?” My stomach lands somewhere around my shoes. I can’t believe this was true the entire time we were together. I can’t believe he hasn’t told me this until now. “ Why? ”

“She said you were in love with me.”

There’s a sound, this quiet gasping whimper, and it takes me a minute to realize it’s coming from my mouth. “What?” I manage. “She said— what? ”

Sawyer shrugs. “You heard me,” he says quietly, a simple matter-of-factness in his manner that leaves no doubt in my mind he’s telling the truth. “She said you were in love with me even though you’d never admit it, and you had been for a long time, and she thought—” He shakes his head. “She thought I loved you back.”

“What?” I say again, just the one word on repeat like a CD that’s gotten stuck. My first reaction is this totally irrational embarrassment on behalf of my fifteen-year-old self, although—what with our kid being big enough to walk and talk—it’s probably a little late to feel humiliated at the idea of Sawyer knowing I had a crush on him back then. Still, knowing that Allie sold me out like that, used my most private feelings for some kind of messed-up emotional currency in a drunk fight with her boyfriend—that stings. For the hundred thousandth time I wish she hadn’t crashed her car and disappeared forever, if only so I could tell her what a bitch move that was.

Then again: I betrayed her, too. I think of the very first time Sawyer ever kissed me, on the hood of the Jeep outside the ice cream place on the very last night of Allie’s life. There’s no limit to the ways that we managed to fail each other as best friends, Allie and I. It makes me feel so colossally sad.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think she meant to hurt you,” Sawyer says now, watching my face as if he’s trying to read hieroglyphics carved there. “I think she was just … upset.” He shrugs one more time, honest and regretful. “And anyway, it’s not like she was wrong.”

I stare at him. I blink. “Meaning … ?”

“Are you kidding?” Sawyer looks at me like I’m deranged, like we’re still on two totally different sides of the river. “Why do you think I came looking for you that night, Reena? To see if it was true. I left my drunk girlfriend with her car keys and I came and I found you, do you understand that? Why the hell would I ever have done that if I didn’t care whether or not it was true?”

“Uh-uh.” I shake my head stubbornly, refusing to believe it. “You never paid one speck of attention to me before—”

“No, you never paid one speck of attention!” Sawyer’s voice rises. “You were so worried about making sure I never knew you felt one way or the other about me so that you wouldn’t have to be embarrassed or vulnerable or whatever— ” He stops and gets up off the glider. Turns around to look me in the eye. “Well, guess what, Reena? I never knew you felt one way or the other about me.” He shrugs a little, elegant shoulders just barely moving. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen him do. “So I guess you won.”

We gaze at each other for a moment, the rain still hissing steadily all around us and my heart beating fast like moth wings, so small and whisper-quiet inside my chest. I know it’s my move here, that Sawyer’s told me the worst and most honest thing he can think of. I remember the fight I had with Allie that night at the party: You want to win this fight, Reena? It doesn’t feel like I’ve won anything at all.

“It means woodcutter,” I tell him finally, wiping either rain or tears off my face with the back of one cold, damp hand. I don’t know why it suddenly feels like it matters.

Sawyer physically startles at the sound of my voice. He looks at me, blinking. “Huh?” he asks.

“Your name,” I manage after a moment. “One who saws.”