Better than Perfect. Melissa Kantor

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СКАЧАТЬ to you,” I said, walking backward toward the exit. “I’m going to Sofia’s.” I turned around and started walking faster.

      “Juliet!” he called.

      He didn’t run after me, though. I’d known he wouldn’t.

      It would have meant making a scene.

      

      Standing in the parking lot, amazed that so much had happened and yet it was still light out, I realized I didn’t have my car. It reminded me of being an underclassman, when Sofia and I would go to Roosevelt Field Mall or the Miracle Mile and then have to call one of our mothers to come get us. Well, it wasn’t like my mother could come get me now. I crossed the street and walked into a pub with MCMANUS’S written across the front in loopy green neon. Inside, everything was either dark wood or green. It was the kind of bar Sofia and I had discovered we could usually get served in even without fake IDs. Standing next to the hostess’s podium, I couldn’t imagine how walking into a bar, ordering a glass of wine, and getting it handed to me had ever made me happy and giggly or how it ever would again.

      I was seventeen years old and my mother might have just tried to kill herself. How would anything ever make me happy again?

      The hostess asked if she could help me in a way that made me think she’d asked more than once. I snapped to attention and asked if she had the number of a cab company.

      “Island Taxi’s right around the corner, hon. You’re probably better off just going over there rather than calling.” I must have looked like a crazy person, because she offered to get somebody to take me, but I thanked her and said I was okay. She didn’t seem convinced, and she watched me as I headed to the door. I thought maybe there was blood on my tank top, but when I got onto the sidewalk and checked, I didn’t see any.

      The cab dropped me off in front of my house. I paid the man and got out, then stood on the lawn trying to force myself to go inside. I was usually pretty self-disciplined—in swim meets, if the stakes were high enough, I could push myself past the point where my lungs felt like they were going to explode, and even though public speaking terrified me, I was one of the best debaters on the team. But standing on my front lawn, which was damp from the early evening sprinkling it automatically got every other day, I knew there was no way I could take my key out of my bag, put it in the front door of my house, and walk through it.

      Because what was I supposed to do once I got inside my house—clean my mother’s blood off the bathroom floor?

      I took my phone out of my bag even though I wasn’t thinking about calling anyone. Jason’s email was still unopened. I’d gotten it only a few hours earlier, but thinking back to that moment in my hallway when I’d decided to open it after waking my mom was like remembering something that had happened to someone else. Still, I automatically clicked on it and started reading.

      J, I love you and miss you more than I can say. But right now I am digesting an unbelievable meal and I have to admit that it is making the pain of your absence easier to bear …

      I hit reply without bothering to finish reading what he wrote.

      Dear Jason, I have something very bad to tell you. Last night or early this morning, my mother might have tried to …

      But then I stopped typing. Had she or hadn’t she? I deleted might have tried to and instead wrote swallowed some pills. The words looked bizarre. And anyway, my mother had been swallowing some pills all summer. What she’d done last night was swallow too many pills. But how many? One too many? Two too many? A bottle too many?

      And how was I supposed to put what I’d just seen in an email anyway? I tried to imagine Jason, his stomach full of some insanely delectable meal, sitting on the terrace at the villa the Robinsons had rented and getting an email from me in which I said my mother might or might not have tried to kill herself. There was just no way. I had to call him.

      But he didn’t have service on his cell phone in Europe. Neither did Grace. Mark had service on his work cell phone, but I didn’t have that number. My mom’s phone might have it, though. I reached into my bag for my keys, but once I had them in my hand, I couldn’t bring myself to put them in the front door. Opening the door would mean going into the house. Going into the house would mean going upstairs to get my mother’s phone. Getting my mother’s phone would mean going into her room and seeing … everything.

      And anyway, Jason had been sitting on the terrace after dinner hours ago. By now his family was sound asleep. You didn’t call people up in the middle of the night in the middle of their vacation and tell them your mother had taken too many pills. You just didn’t do something like that.

      I put the keys back in my bag and walked across the lawn to the driveway and got into my car. I put my hands on the steering wheel and turned it gently from side to side, like I used to do when I was a little kid and my parents would let me pretend to drive. I wanted to be someplace—anyplace—that wasn’t my house, and I turned the ignition and backed out of the driveway, not even sure where I was going, just desperate to keep moving.

      Deciding to find Sofia at the club happened when I’d already been driving in the opposite direction for almost twenty minutes. There was nobody behind me and nobody coming toward me, so I made an illegal U-turn so sharp my tires squealed in protest and headed toward the Milltown Country Club.

      It was hot in the car, so I rolled the windows up and put the air conditioner on, but that only increased the sensation I had of being trapped, so I lowered the windows and left the air conditioner on. I cranked the volume up on the radio, but I couldn’t find a song I could stand listening to, and I turned the music off. Then it was too quiet in the car, and I turned it back on and plugged my phone in, glancing down at the screen and searching for something to listen to, then looking back up at the road, then back at my phone. I was skimming through a bunch of random titles when I flew past the sign for the Milltown Country Club. Keeping one hand on my phone, I made a hard left into the driveway.

      I didn’t see the driver of the van that had been coming from the opposite direction and that was also making a turn into the Milltown Country Club’s driveway. There was the sound of honking and of rubber screaming against pavement as he spun his van far over to the side of the driveway, narrowly missing one of the enormous oak trees that lined the drive. My stomach hit my throat as I slammed on my brakes and braced my arms against the steering wheel. But instead of the crunch of glass and metal, there was only the sound of a guy cursing his brains out.

      I leaped out of my car. “I’m so sorry,” I said. My voice and my hands were shaking. “That was all my fault. I’m really sorry.”

      “Jesus, woman!” said the driver. He had his head against the back of the seat, so I couldn’t see him until I got up to the side of the van and put my head near the window. He was a little older than I was—maybe in college. He was also odd looking; it was almost as if his face was made up of different people’s faces—nose from one person, lips from another. His eyes were very blue.

      “I’m really sorry,” I said again, squinting into the dark van. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

      “Clearly,” he said.

      “Are you okay?” asked a girl from the passenger seat in lightly accented British English. Like the driver, she had bright blue eyes and black СКАЧАТЬ