Sometimes, when she was alone in the house, she took the phone over to her bed and listened to the dial tone.
She practiced Park’s number, her finger slid-ing across the dial. Sometimes, after the dial tone stopped, she pretended he was whispering in her ear.
‘Have you ever had a boyfriend?’ Dani asked.
Dani was in theater camp, too. They ate lunch together, sitting on the stage with their legs dangling in the orchestra pit.
‘No,’ Eleanor said.
Park wasn’t a boyfriend, he was a champion.
And they weren’t going to break up. Or get bored. Or drift apart. (They weren’t going to become another stupid high school romance.) They were just going to stop.
Eleanor had decided back in his dad’s truck.
She’d decided in Albert Lea, Minnesota. If they weren’t going to get married – if it wasn’t forever
– it was only a matter of time.
They were just going to stop.
Park was never going to love her more than he did on the day they said goodbye.
And she couldn’t bear to think of him loving her less.
Park
When he got sick of himself, Park went to her old house.
Sometimes
the
truck
was
there.
Sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes, Park stood at the end of the sidewalk and hated everything the house stood for.
CHAPTER 56
Eleanor
Letters, postcards, packages that rattled like loaded cassette tapes. None of them opened, none of them read.
‘Dear Park,’ she wrote on a clean sheet of stationery. ‘Dear Park,’ she tried to explain.
But the explanations fell apart in her hands.
Everything true was too hard to write – he was too much to lose. Everything she felt for him was too hot to touch.
‘I’m sorry,’ she wrote, then crossed it out.
‘It’s just …’ she tried again.
She threw the half-written letters away. She threw the unopened envelopes in the bottom drawer.
‘Dear Park,’ she whispered, her forehead hanging over the dresser, ‘just stop.’
Park
His dad said Park needed a summer job to pay for gas.
Neither of them mentioned that Park never went anywhere. Or that he’d started putting eyeliner on with his thumb. Blacking out his own eyes.
He looked just wrecked enough to get a job at Drastic Plastic. The girl who hired him had two rows of holes in each ear.
His mom stopped bringing in the mail. He knew it was because she hated telling him that nothing had come for him. Park brought in the mail himself now every night when he got home from work. Every night praying for rain.
He had an endless supply and an insatiable appetite for punk music. ‘I can’t hear myself think in here,’ his dad said, coming into Park’s room for the third night in a row to turn down the stereo.
Duh, Eleanor would have said.
Eleanor didn’t start school in the fall. Not with Park anyway.
She didn’t celebrate the fact that juniors don’t have to take gym. She didn’t say, ‘Unholy union, Batman,’ when Steve and Tina eloped over Labor Day.
Park had written her a letter all about it. He’d told her everything that happened, and everything that didn’t, every day since she’d left.
He kept writing her letters months after he stopped sending them. On New Year’s Day, he wrote that he hoped she’d get everything she ever wished for. Then he tossed the letter into a box under his bed.
CHAPTER 57
Park
He’d stopped trying to bring her back.
She only came back when she felt like it anyway, in dreams and lies and broken-down déjà vu.
Like, Park would be driving to work and he’d see a girl with red hair standing on the street, and he’d swear for half an airless moment that it was her.
Or he’d wake up when it was still dark, sure that she was waiting for him outside. Sure that she needed him.
But he couldn’t summon her. Sometimes he couldn’t even remember what she looked like, even when he was looking at her picture. (Maybe he’d looked at it too much.)
He’d stopped trying to bring her back.
So why did he keep coming here? To this crappy little house …
Eleanor wasn’t here, she was never really here – and she’d been gone too long. Almost a year now.
Park turned to walk away from the house, but the little brown truck whipped too fast into the driveway, jumping the curb and nearly clipping him. Park stopped on the sidewalk and waited.
The driver’s side door swung open.
Maybe, he thought. Maybe this is why I’m here.
Eleanor’s stepdad – Richie – leaned slowly out of the cab. Park recognized him from the one time he’d seen him before, when Park had brought Eleanor the second issue of Watchmen, and her stepdad had answered the door …
The final issue of Watchmen came out a few months after Eleanor left. He wondered if she’d read it, and whether she thought Ozymandias was a villain, and what she thought Dr Manhattan meant when he said, ‘Nothing ever ends’ at the end. Park still wondered what Eleanor thought about everything.
Her stepdad didn’t see Park at first. Richie was moving slowly, uncertainly. When he did notice Park, he looked at him like he wasn’t sure he was really there. ‘Who are you?’ Richie shouted.
Park didn’t answer. Richie turned jaggedly, jerking toward him. ‘What do you want?’ Even from a few feet away, he smelled sour. Like beer, like basements.
Park stood his ground.
I want to kill you, he thought. And I can, he realized. I should.
Richie wasn’t much bigger than Park, and he was drunk and disoriented. Plus, he could never want to hurt Park as much as Park wanted to hurt him.
Unless Richie was armed, unless he got lucky
– Park could do this.
Richie shuffled closer. ‘What do you want?’
he shouted again. The force of his own voice knocked him off balance and he tipped forward, falling thickly to the ground. Park had to step back not to catch him.
‘Fuck,’ Richie said, raising himself up on his knees and holding himself not quite steady.
I want to kill you, Park thought.
And I can.
Someone should.
Park looked down at his steel-toe Docs. He’d just bought them at work. (On sale, with his em-ployee discount.) He looked at Richie’s head, hanging from his neck like a leather bag.
Park hated him more than he thought it was possible to hate someone. More than he’d ever thought it was possible to feel anything …
Almost.
He lifted his boot and kicked the ground in front of Richie’s face. Ice and mud and driveway slopped into the older man’s open mouth. Richie coughed violently and banked into the ground.
Park waited for him to get up, but Richie just lay there spitting curses, and rubbing salt and gravel into his eyes.
He wasn’t dead. But he wasn’t getting up.
Park waited.
And then he walked home.
Eleanor
Letters, postcards, yellow padded packages that rattled in her hands. None of them opened, none of them read.
It was bad when the letters came every day. It was worse when they stopped.
Sometimes she laid them out on the carpet like tarot cards, like Wonka bars, and wondered whether it was too late.
CHAPTER 58
Park
Eleanor didn’t go to prom with him.
Cat did.
Cat from work. She was thin and dark, and her eyes were as blue and flat as breath mints.
When Park held Cat’s hand, it was like holding hands with a mannequin, and it was such a relief that he kissed her. He fell asleep on prom night in his tuxedo pants and a Fugazi T-shirt.
He woke up the next morning when something light fell on his shirt – he opened his eyes. His dad was standing over him.
‘Mail call,’ his dad said, almost gently. Park put his hand to his heart.
Eleanor hadn’t written him a letter.
It was a postcard. ‘Greetings from the Land of 10,000 Lakes,’ it said on the front. Park turned it over and recognized her scratchy handwriting.
It filled his head with song lyrics.
He sat up. He smiled. Something heavy and winged took off from his chest.
Eleanor hadn’t written him a letter, it was a postcard.
Just three words long.