Katie Cotugno - How to Love

Halfway through the psalm and Hannah’s wriggles turn to whimpers; her body is thermal and heavy in my arms. She’s crabby, is all. She didn’t sleep well last night—neither of us slept very well last night, if you want to know the truth—but in this second it feels like she’s on to me, all terrifying toddler intuition. In this second it feels like she knows.

I scoop her up and head for the aisle, because in another second we’re both going to lose it, right in the middle of a reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: Behold, I tell you a mystery. We burst through the doors at the back, straight into a blinding shock of light.

“I never liked Paul much anyway,” I tell Hannah once we’re hidden away in the courtyard outside the church, a flagstone patio peopled by half a dozen life-size statues of angels and saints, like some kind of weird religious cocktail party hosted by the apostle Bartholomew. I set Hannah on her feet and let her walk. Summer in Broward County is brutal and haunted, all palm trees and the green tangle of sea grapes wound around the grotto on the lawn. Hannah grabs at a cluster of Spanish moss with her pudgy starfish hands. “Oh, boy,” I say. “Whatcha got over there, chick?”

“Oh, boy,” she repeats, and I grin. Hannah’s a hugely beautiful kid, dark-haired and sloe-eyed, even taking into account the fact that I grew her inside my body and therefore might possibly be a little prejudiced. Strangers stop and say she’s beautiful all the time. “Oh, boy !”

I sit down on a wooden bench to watch her. A taciturn Virgin Mary holds court on top of a dried-up fountain at the edge of the patio, a missing chunk of plaster where her veil should meet her dress. I think of my own mom, whom I hardly remember—just a waterfall of dark hair and the faint smell of lavender—and wonder if she’d have any secrets to share. I run my thumb over the jagged edge of stone, waiting. Soledad prays to Mary for virtually everything and swears that Mary answers every time, but if either this mother or mine have any advice to dispense, at the moment they are holding their tongues.

“Fat lot of help you are,” I tell them, and jump up to catch my kid before she falls.

Before

I had no friends in tenth grade.

Okay, that’s dramatic. I had friends. I didn’t eat lunch alone on a toilet seat or anything. Mostly, I just didn’t eat lunch. I went to the library. I hung out on the bleachers and read. When I did go to the cafeteria, I sat with Shelby, the new hostess at the restaurant. Shelby was a junior; she’d just moved from Tucson with her mom and her twin brother, Aaron, although he’d only needed about two days in the pestilent swamp of South Florida to decide there was absolutely no way he could ever live here. He’d fled to New Hampshire to live with their dad before school had even started. Shelby had hair like a flaming neon carrot and a mouth like a merchant marine; she wore tiny silver hoops all up the side of her left ear and was dating the captain of the girls’ soccer team. I’d automatically assumed she thought I was too boring to breathe air until the day she plopped her tray right next to mine and demanded to know what was up with the food in this godforsaken place like maybe we’d been friends all our lives.

“It sucks,” I told her, blinking in grateful surprise. “That’s … basically what’s up.”

Shelby grinned, handed me half the Kit Kat she was unwrapping. “Looks that way.”

She was giving me a ride to work one afternoon, nineties girl rock blaring from the speakers in her decrepit Volvo wagon as she pulled out of the parking lot, when she snorted and gestured out the windshield with her chin. “Is that the bartender?” she asked, squinting a little. “From the restaurant?”

I followed her gaze to the side of the building, half hidden by a row of dry, browning shrubs: In the shadow cast by the overhang above the side door of the gym, Allie and Sawyer were pressed against the concrete, his palm sliding steadily up her skirt.

“Yeah,” I said slowly. For a second it felt hard to breathe, like there was something unfamiliar taking up space in my chest beside my heart and lungs. “Yeah, that’s him.”

“People gettin’ at it in broad daylight,” Shelby said brightly, pulling out into traffic. “That’s how you know the terrorists haven’t won.” Then she looked at me, her pale eyebrows knitting together. “What?” she asked. “Shit, sorry. Are you one of those people who’s really sensitive about terrorist jokes?”

That made me laugh. “I’m not particularly sensitive about anything,” I lied, glancing out the window for another half a second before tilting my head up to stare at the fat, heavy clouds.

The year ground on in that way—Halloween, Thanksgiving. I finally got my learner’s permit. I spent a whole lot of time with my journal. Soledad watched me carefully, cataloging the narrowing parameters of my teenage life like an anthropologist conducting a field study: school, work, home. Rinse, repeat. I didn’t tell her about Allie and Sawyer—never told her about Allie and me —but that didn’t stop her from knowing. “Do you want to talk about this?” she asked me once, Saturday night and three episodes into a Bridezillas marathon on cable.

I shrugged like I didn’t have the slightest idea what she meant. “Talk about what?” I wondered blandly.

Soledad rolled her eyes.

I called Allie once, for the record. She didn’t pick up, and I didn’t leave a message.

Also for the record: She didn’t call me back.

The answer, I always thought, was to get out of town. I’d always liked to read about foreign places—I’d been getting National Geographic since I was ten—but that winter I was absolutely insatiable, camped out on my bed surrounded by travel books from the library, their cellophane jackets sticky with dust. I plotted. I made lists. I stayed up all night clicking through blog after blog, stories and pictures of women who spent years in Morocco and Tanzania and the South of France—then mapped my own itinerary, tracing my route with a silver Sharpie like some kind of imaginary Silk Road.

I wanted so, so badly to leave.

“Where you going tonight?” my father asked me one evening, hovering in the doorway of my bedroom, tonic and lime in his hand. He’d been playing the piano downstairs, and somewhere in my head I’d dimly registered the quiet, the way you notice the dishwasher kicking off.

“Chicago,” I told him cheerfully, looking up from the pictures of Oak Park on my laptop. He’d had a heart attack a couple of years before, my father, collapsing in the parking lot outside my eighth-grade graduation; I tried to be cheerful with him whenever I could. “Or possibly Copenhagen.”

“Chicago’s a pretty good music town,” he told me, nodding like he was thinking about it, like it was a place I might actually be headed. “You might want to lay over in the kitchen first, though. Soledad’s making pesto.”

I smiled and closed my computer, rolled myself off the bed. “Be right there.”

One morning that spring I got a note in homeroom saying I needed to go to Guidance by the end of the day, which left me feeling startled and uneasy. I’d never been called to the office before. I wondered if I was in trouble for something I didn’t know I’d done, or if some well-meaning Samaritan had expressed concern about my ability to cope with the tyranny of high school in general. “We’ve noticed you’re socially inept,” I pictured the counselor saying, her jowly face tilted to the side to show how well she was listening. “You stare out the window constantly. You’re obsessive, and you spend too much time in your own brain.”