First You Try Everything by Jane Mccafferty

Author:Jane Mccafferty
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Adult
ISBN: 9780066210629
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

To one another! For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

He wanted to write back, “We are the ignorant armies clashing by night, Evvie.”

She sent a long letter explaining to him that love played hide-and-seek, that when it was hiding you didn’t just quit playing the game, and that she was already changing and that she missed his mother. The letter’s tone was restrained (for Evvie) but had a PS saying she’d give years of her life just to have one more night with him. Didn’t she recognize this as a brand of insanity? He’d read once that a certain kind of grief was insanity. She sent him a poem every day, for two weeks. Pablo Neruda. Dickinson. Shakespeare.

He dreaded putting his hand into the mailbox, but one small part of him—he was barely conscious of this—remained fascinated and oddly grateful for her persistence.

“Let’s take a break,” Lauren said. “Let’s walk over there by the flowers.”

Lauren wore short faded red gym shorts with white blouses on the tennis court, where he couldn’t stop watching her. Her brand of compact grace and coordination had eluded him all his life—not just in his own body, but also in the bodies of those he’d loved. For years Evvie had tried to teach herself to do a simple cartwheel. Finally she gave up. She was the sort of person who fell down steps at least once a year, walked into tree branches, and bumped her head on doors. “I can’t help it if I was born with impaired proprioception!” She’d been on crutches three times in sixteen years. A mere transient in her body—a neon JUST VISITING sign might easily have flashed across her chest—whereas Lauren truly inhabited her skin, as if long ago she had decided to settle there for the duration. This, he imagined, was the source of her happiness.

They took a break. In the shade he noticed her sky-colored eyes. “We have to pick up Ramona from Scouts in twenty minutes.”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“She’s starting to get attached to you.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“She’s always asking if you’ll be coming over!”

“That’s nice. But maybe she’s just asking so she can be prepared.”

Lauren looked at him, thinking. She never had a knee-jerk response. She listened to others, mulled over their words, and then spoke her answer, simply, rarely stumbling. The more he was with her, the greater his respect for this quality grew.

“Maybe she is trying to prepare herself. I hadn’t thought of that.” She smiled, meaning to compliment him, and he received it like warm water down his spine, and loved her heart-shaped face as it turned away toward the whoosh of wind in the shuddering tree beside them, all the leaves turning over, their shimmering undersides silver in the light.

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