Elizabeth Scott - Between Here and Forever

“No,” he says simply. “So, how come you don’t drive?”

I wonder what kind of trouble he got into with his parents. A guy who’d buy an old lady’s car because her relatives couldn’t be bothered to notice that she’d left behind a shopping list didn’t real y seem like the kind of guy who’d be shipped off to live here.

But then, once upon a time Tess and Claire were such good friends that Tess had talked about the two of them as if they were practical y one person, and then she cut Claire out of her heart like she was a stone that needed to be cast aside.

“I don’t have a car,” I say. “I did, but it was Tess’s—she bought it to drive back and forth to school with money she earned working at Organic Gourmet. She gave it to me after her first semester was over, when she decided she didn’t need to come home so much, and if she did, she and Beth could—”

“Beth. Is that the—?”

“Yeah,” I say. “The girl from before. Anyway, she and Beth came here back then, and Tess left her car. She said I could drive it if I wanted. When I first got my license, every time I went somewhere people would come up to the car and say, ‘Tess?’ and then look disappointed and try to cover it up when they saw it was only me.”

“Every time?”

“Close enough,” I say lightly, like the memory of those first few months I had the car, of people asking for Tess and their eyes dimming when they saw me, didn’t stil sting.

“Why?” he says. “I mean, she’s pretty, but I don’t get why—you make it sound like you’re nothing compared to her.”

“I’m not nothing,” I say, although I think it’s actual y pretty accurate. It sounds like self-pity to say it though, and I don’t want to start going there. I wal owed in it after Jack, in between my bouts of fury at him and Tess and myself, and what did it get me? Nothing. “I just—one thing about living with someone like Tess is that it makes you face up to things. Even if you don’t want to.”

It’s the closest I’ve ever come to talking about Jack with anyone but Claire. I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s strange how easy it is for me to talk to Eli.

It’s nice.

Eli’s silent for a long moment, and then we turn onto the road that leads to the ferry landing. There are a few cars waiting, parked with their lights on, casting a dim glow into the dark. “So, you stil haven’t answered my question about why you don’t drive.”

I swal ow, and almost wish he’d asked about the things I’ve had to face up to, that he’d push me to talk in a way that would lead to Jack. That, I could deflect. This, I can’t. It is why I am here. Why he is here with me.

“She was driving my—her—car,” I say. “It was New Year’s Day, the actual day part. The safe-to-drive-in part. She’d spent the night before at a friend’s house, after a party, and she—there was an accident. Her car was totaled and she … wel , you know the rest.”

“So do you think—do you think that if you’d drove that night, you might—?”

“No,” I say. “It was an accident. A terrible, tragic accident. If I could have driven the car, I would. I don’t—I’m not crazy about my bike.” My bike that I used to ride around the summer I fel for Jack. My bike that I put away only to take out when Tess’s accident took away my car. My life as I knew it.

“Oh,” Eli says, as the ferry blows its horn, signaling that passengers wil be loading soon. I get out and motion for him to pop the trunk before I shut the door.

There aren’t any cars behind him, but he doesn’t start to back up as I move up along beside him, doesn’t start to turn and drive away. Instead, he rol s his window down.

“Abby,” he says, and I look over at him, breath catching even though I was just in the car with him, even though I have spent al night near him.

“What?” I say, and I’m off-kilter, breathless, because I’ve spent al this time with him and he keeps talking to me, keeps acting like I’m actual y interesting, and it keeps throwing me off. Keeps making me think stupid things like how I could ask him to come on the ferry with me. Come home with me.

I shake my head, but it’s too late. I’m shaking.

“Is there anything you’re afraid of?” Eli says.

You, I think. I am terrified of you. Of how your kindness makes me like you in spite of myself. Of how you make me dream things I haven’t dreamed in forever.

You, I think. But I don’t say it.

morning. My father makes pancakes, and my mother makes bacon and usual y scrambles a few eggs too.

When Tess was younger, she would get out cookie cutters and turn Dad’s pancakes into hearts and stars. Sometimes, if she was upset about something, she wouldn’t, and a few times, right after she stopped talking to Claire, and then again when she started worrying about col ege so much she’d basical y stopped sleeping, she’d refuse to come down for breakfast at al .

She’d lie in splendid, solitary misery in her room, Mom trying to tempt her downstairs and my father eventual y carrying a tray up to her. I’d pick it up later, the food untouched and Tess lying in bed watching the ceiling. She could be poisonous then, responding to my footsteps with icy glares or worse, acting like I wasn’t there at al . Looking through me like she looked through Claire.

We kept up the breakfasts after Tess went away to col ege, although Dad started experimenting with his pancake recipe (the gingerbread ones were a hit, the cornmeal ones—not so much) and Mom switched to turkey bacon and “egg product” after her last doctor’s visit.

We kept them up after the accident too, after we knew Tess wasn’t coming home right away, though the pancakes had bits of eggshel s in them for the first few weeks and Mom tended to forget the bacon until it started to burn.

This morning, Dad’s made peanut butter pancakes, and I get out the strawberry jel y and smear it on one, watching it thin and ooze, trickling across my plate.

“You should come see Tess with us today,” Mom says, depositing two pieces of turkey bacon on my plate.

“Is this because of what happened last night?”

“What?” Mom says.

“Never mind,” I mutter, but it’s too late. Mom sits down across from me and says, “Abby,” in her tel -me-everything voice.

I tel her, and she glances at Dad as I finish talking, then looks back at me. “We know you want Tess to wake up, and we want that too. But there hasn’t been any indication—”

“I know what I saw.”

“We—” Dad says, and Mom looks at him, shaking her head slightly.

“She has a right to know, Katie,” he says, sitting down with his own plate of pancakes. “We sometimes see—sometimes we see things that look like movement too,” Dad says. “I—we saw them more before, back when—back when she was first hurt. But the doctor says she isn’t responding, not like you think. Her brain activity is … minimal.”

“Minimal,” I echo, my appetite gone. Tess has been in the hospital long enough for me to learn its language, and minimal brain function means the doctor thinks Tess—the Tess I know, the Tess whose books and clothes are waiting for her upstairs—is gone. The doctor thinks al that’s left is a shel .

“We thought you might go with us today because—wel , your father and I have decided to transfer Tess to a …” Mom presses her hands together, knotting them so her knuckles meet in a straight, white-edged line. “To a long-term-care facility. It’s out past Milford, in Oxford Hil .”

“What?” I say, stunned, and stare at Dad. “Why?”

He looks down at the table. “Our insurance won’t—they have to go with the doctor’s assessment, or say they do, and we can’t afford to keep her in the hospital for much longer.”