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“I changed my name at eighteen,” she says.
“To Beckett.”
“To Beckett.” A breath. “Picked it myself. Off a spine. Samuel Beckett — I was eighteen and dramatic and I’d just done Endgame, and I thought, there’s a man who knew nothing was coming to save you and wrote it down funny.” Something almost like a smile, at the window. “Sloane Beckett doesn’t exist in any system back there. No school record. No church roll. Nothing my father can phone up and ask after when he’s three drinks in and feeling sentimental. Nothing my mother could look up if she ever got curious between cards. I built a person they can’t find. Then I went and got into Whitmore as her. So.” She shrugs, one shoulder. “Working as designed.”
And there it is. The whole thing. She built a self out of nothing, named it off a bookshelf, and made it un-findable, and she’s spent two years walking around campus inside it, past her roommates, past me, where nobody knew there was a kid on a kitchen floor underneath, holding the ugly orange crayon, learning to read a room before she walked into it.
I drive for a minute. I don’t fill it.
“I like your name,” I say.
It’s not the right size for what she handed me. I know that. But it’s true, and it’s mine to say, and I’ve worked out by now that the big response is for the person giving it, not the person getting it. Sloane doesn’t want big. Big would make her sorry she said anything. So I give her the small true one and let it be small.
“I like it too,” she says, to the glass. “Took me a while. But I do.”
“For the record,” I keep my eyes on the road, “you didn’t tell me any of that to get a reaction out of me, and I’m not going to give you one you have to do something with. But I heard all of it. And it doesn’t move anything. In case some part of you was running the math on whether it would.”
Quiet. Then: “I wasn’t.”
“Okay.”
“I was a little.”
“I know,” I say. “It didn’t.”
When she’s all the way done — when the quiet’s gone soft instead of sharp — I take my right hand off the wheel and put it palm-up on the console between us. I don’t reach for hers. I just leave it there. An offer, not a grab.
She looks at it. Then she fits her hand into mine, and I close mine around it, and I put my eyes back on the road, and we don’t talk for a long time, and it’s the good kind of not talking. Track eleven, somewhere in there. The one Britta made for the fog. I’m going to have to tell my sister she was right, which I will never do.
We hit the Haven line a little after seven, with the dark come all the way down. The arena’s lit off the highway, the practice lights, white over the trees, and I get the dumb happy pull I always get coming back to it.
I run the weekend back one more time. My mother and the Tupperware. My dad holding the shake a second long. The twins deciding she was theirs before lunch. Sloane with her boots on my dash, telling the window the worst of it because she’d decided, finally, after two years of deciding the opposite about everyone, that I was safe to do it in front of.
She gave me the whole key. Nobody else has the whole key. I’m holding it right now, with her hand still in mine on the console.
She’s quiet next to me, watching Haven come up out of the dark, and I figure it’s the good quiet. The emptied-out kind you get after you finally set a heavy thing down where someone can help you carry it. I pull onto our street. Every light in the Raven House is on, because nobody in that house has turned off a light in the history of the house.
I cut the engine. The place glows. Sloane sits a second before she reaches for the door, and she turns and looks at me, and there’s something in her face I decide is just tired from the drive.
I lean over and kiss her forehead.
“That was the hard part,” I tell her. “We already drove through it. Whatever’s left, we did the worst of it back there on the Pike.”
I believe it all the way down. I’m happy in the flat, total, stupid way you only get to be a handful of times in a life, before you learn better.
I don’t know it’s the last easy thought I get for a while.
Chapter 27
Sloane
The thing about staying is that it has a rhythm now, and I know the rhythm, which is its own kind of danger.
Practice runs late on weeknights, so I study at the Raven House kitchen table until Beau gets back smelling like cold and rubber, and then we trade. I quiz him on comp lit while he eats standing up at the counter, because he can’t sit still after the ice. He reads my blocking notes back to me in the wrong order on purpose until I throw a highlighter at his head. Finals are two weeks out. We’ve built a thing that works, the two of us, in the warm yellow kitchen with the good overhead light, and I don’t examine it too closely, the way you learn not to look straight at the one instrument in a bad rig that’s actually holding.
Last Tuesday I got my period and braced for the renegotiation, because in my experience that’s a week you get endured. Instead, Beau looked up from the couch and said okay like I’d told him it might rain, and went and found the heating pad I didn’t know he owned, and that night he didn’t try for anything. He put on a movie neither of us watched and pulled me into the curve of him and ran his thumb along the rise of my hip until I went under. The worst part — the part I keep turning over when I should be sleeping — is how fast I got used to it. Two days. It took me two days to start expecting to be handled gently. That’s the whole trick of it. That’s how they get you. You let yourself expect the soft thing and then the soft thing is a hostage.
I found the rest of it on a Thursday. I’d run out of my shampoo, the coconut one I budget for and ration down to the last watery inch, and I stepped into his shower braced to use the three-in-one that smells like an equipment bag, and there it was. My shampoo. My conditioner. The body wash I use. A box of the tampons I buy, the ones that cost more, that I would never in a hundred years have written on a list for somebody else to see. All of it lined up on the shelf like it had grown there. He’d read the brands off my empties and gone and bought every one without a word, and when I came out with wet hair and nothing to say he just looked at me over the top of his laptop, easy, unbothered, and said, “What? What’s wrong?”
