Tess Sharpe - Far From You

One night she folds her hands over her briefcase and waits until I raise my eyes to meet hers, and I know, with more than a little dread, that she’s finally ready to talk.

“I should have stopped and listened to you when you told me you were clean.” It sounds like she’s rehearsed this in the mirror, like she’d written it down and crossed things out, painstakingly trying to get the words right, like it’s a speech instead of a confession.

I’m quiet for a long time. It’s hard to even think about what to say. Her words can’t change what she did; they can’t erase those months I spent trapped at Seaside, forced to figure out how to grieve on my own. But I can’t change that no matter how wrong it was. She did it only because she was trying to save me.

She will always try to save me.

That, more than anything else, is what makes me apologize.

“Look, I get it. I do. I lied and I kept everything from everyone and I just…I wasn’t very good, and I’m sorry—”

“Honey.” Mom’s face, always so composed, crumples, worry lines appearing out of nowhere. “You’ve been through so much.”

“That can’t be an excuse,” I say. “There can’t be any excuses. Every single therapist you’ve sent me to will tell you that. I’m an addict. I’ll always be an addict. Just like I’ll always be crippled. And you’ve never been okay with either. I am. It took me a long time, but I am. You need to be, too.”

“I’m okay with who you are, Sophie,” she says. “I promise. I love who you are. I love you no matter what.”

I want to believe her.

Mom reaches out and takes my hand, tilting it so the rings—Mina’s and mine—shine in the lamplight. She doesn’t touch them, seems to understand that she shouldn’t, and I’m grateful for that small gesture. For the strength of her fingers, smooth and comforting, wrapped around mine.

“When you were in Oregon, Mina would come by. I used to find her up in the tree house. Or she’d sneak into your bedroom to do homework. We’d talk sometimes. She was scared you wouldn’t forgive her for telling us about the drugs. I told her that she shouldn’t worry. That you were the type of girl who didn’t let anything stand in the way of loving someone. Especially her.”

I look up at her, surprised at the warmth in her eyes that’s almost encouragement. Mom smiles and brushes her cheek against mine. “It’s a good thing, Sophie,” she says softly. “Being able to love someone that much. It makes you brave.”

I squeeze her hand tightly and I choose to believe.

NOVEMBER

“You sure you want to do this?”

I stare down at the black notebook in my hands. When Trev brought her diary to me, turned up by the police during a second search of the house, I didn’t even want to touch it. I could barely stand to keep it in the house. So a week later we drove to the lake and built a fire on the beach, waiting for night to fall and delaying the inevitable.

“Do you want to read it?” I ask him.

He shakes his head.

My fingers stroke the smooth black cover, tracing the ridges of the binding, the edges of the pages. It’s like touching a part of her, the core, the heart and breath and blood of her in purple ink and cream-colored paper.

I could read it. Finally know her through all her layers and secrets.

Part of me wants that. To know. To be sure.

But more than anything, I want to keep my memory of her untainted, not polished by death nor shredded to pieces by words she meant only for herself. I want her to stay with me as she always was: strong and sure in everything but the one thing that mattered most, beautifully cruel and wonderfully sweet, too smart and inquisitive for her own good, and loving me like she didn’t want to believe it was a sin.

I drop the diary into the fire. The pages curl and blacken, her words disappearing into smoke.

The two of us stand quiet and close until the fire dies out. Our shoulders touch as the wind carries away the last of her secrets.

It’s Trev who finally breaks the silence. “Rachel told me you got your GED. That means you’re going back to Portland.”

“Yeah. Right after my birthday.”

“Know what you’re gonna do yet?”

“I don’t,” I say, and it’s wonderful, not to know anything without dreading the feeling. To not have a suspect list in my head. To not think about what’s next except for an open road and a little house with a yoga studio and a vegetable garden in the backyard. “College, I guess, eventually. But I think I’ll take a year off, get a job, figure some things out first.”

He smiles, all lopsided. His eyes go bright.

“What?” I ask.

“She would’ve loved you like this,” he says.

I don’t think it’ll ever be easy to think about it, about all the chances Mina and I missed, the beginning, middle, and end we never had. Maybe we would’ve fizzled out instantly, her fear getting the better of her. Maybe we would’ve finished with high school, with fights and tears and words that couldn’t be taken back. Maybe we would’ve lasted through college, only to end in quiet, strangled silence. Maybe we would’ve had forever.

“You could stay,” he says, looking down. “I could build you that greenhouse you always wanted.”

My smile trembles at the edges. “You know I love you, don’t you?” I ask him. “Because I do, Trev. I really do.”

“I know you do,” he says. “Just…not the way I want you to.”

“I’m sorry.”

And the thing is, I am. In another life, if I had been a different girl, if my heart had gone traditional instead of zinging off after the unexpected, I might have loved him like he wanted. But my heart isn’t simple or straightforward. It’s a complicated mess of wants and needs, boys and girls: soft, rough, and everything in between, an ever-­shifting precipice from which to fall. And as it beats, it’s still her name that thrums through me. Never his.

When I kiss him, a quiet meeting of lips that’s there and gone, it feels like good-bye.

TEN YEARS AGO (SEVEN YEARS OLD)

At lunch on the first day of second grade, I’m eating with Amber and Kyle when I notice the new girl at the far end of the courtyard, sitting alone at a picnic table in her purple dress. Mrs. Durbin had put her next to me in class, but she hasn’t said a word all day. She’d kept her head down even when she was called on.

She still seems sad, so I grab the rest of my lunch and walk over to her.

“I’m fine,” she says when I get to her table, before I can even say anything.

Her face is wet. She scrubs at her cheeks with a fist and glares at me.

“I’m Sophie,” I say. “Can I sit?”

“I guess.”

I slide onto the bench next to her, setting my lunch down. “You’re Mina, right?”

She nods.

“You’re new.”

“We moved,” Mina says. “My daddy went to heaven.”

“Oh.” I bite my lip. I don’t know what to say to that. “Sorry.”

“Do you like horses?” Mina asks, pointing to my sticker-covered lunch box.

“Yeah. My grandpa takes me riding on his land.”

Mina looks impressed. “My brother, Trev, says that sometimes they bite you if you don’t give them sugar.”

I giggle. “They have big teeth. But I give them carrots. You have to make your hand flat.” I hold my hand out, palm up, to show her. “Then they won’t bite.”

Mina does the same with her hand, and our fingertips bump. She looks up and smiles at me.

“Do you have brothers?” she asks. “Or sisters?”

“No, it’s just me.”

Her nose wrinkles. “I wouldn’t like that. Trev’s the best.”

“Sophie!” Amber waves at me. The bell’s about to ring.

I get up, and there’s something about Mina, about the way she’s been crying and how she looks like she’s lost, that makes me hold my hand out to her again. “Come with me?”

She smiles, reaches out, and takes my hand.

We walk into the rest of our lives together, not knowing it’ll end before it’s truly started.

On my eighteenth birthday, I drive to the cemetery at dusk. It takes me a while to find her; I trek across wet grass, weaving between headstones and angel statues to a shady, secluded spot.

It’s plain, polished gray marble with white engraved letters:

Mina Elizabeth Bishop

Beloved Daughter and Sister

I wish this could be like in the movies. That I was the type of person who could reach out and trace the letters of her name and feel peaceful. I wish I could speak to this hunk of marble like it was her, feel comforted that her body is six feet below, believe that her spirit is watching from above.

But I’m not that girl. I never was. Not before or after or now. I can live with this knowledge—a simple gift to myself, quiet acceptance of who I’m becoming from the pieces that remain.

I kneel down next to her and pull the string of solar ­Christmas lights out of my bag. I drape them on her headstone, trailing the strands down both sides of her grave.

I stay until nightfall, watching the lights begin to twinkle. My hand rests on the ground above her. When I get up, my fingers linger in the grass.

I walk to my car and never once do I look back.

Mina’s night-lights will endure. Year after year, Trev will replace them when they dim. And I know that someday, when I’m ready to come home, they’ll light my way.

This book would not be possible without so many people’s support and faith that carried me through its creation. Writing can be a solitary thing until the village it takes to publish a novel welcomes you into their fold. And I was lucky enough to be welcomed by the best village of all.

Thank you to my agent, Sarah Davies, for everything. You changed my entire life, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to thank you properly for what you’ve taught me.

For my editor, Lisa Yoskowitz, thank you for your understanding of the characters and the love story I wanted to tell. You raised me and my work to new heights.

Thanks to Amber Caraveo, whose patience and instincts helped the book blossom in such lovely, deadly ways.

Thanks to the wonderful team at Hyperion, who put so much care and creative spark into all aspects of the book. Special thanks to Kate Hurley, my copy editor, whose sharp eye I am indebted to, and Whitney Manger, who designed me an absolutely beautiful cover.

For my parents and the rest of my amazing family. But especially for my mother, Laurie. Thank you, Mom, for reading every single thing I’ve ever written like it mattered, even my second grade opus “Two Fast Doctors.”

So much gratitude must go to my dedicated, brutally honest critique partners: Elizabeth May and Allison Estry, who make my manuscripts bleed in the best ways. And thanks to Kate Bassett, for beta-reading and cheerleading.

Thanks to the Fourteenery, for hand holding, hilarity, and always blaming it on Melvin.

For Franny Gaede, who is truly the Walter to my Hildy.

A shout-out to the girls of the Crazy Chat. You ladies know who you are. Thank you from the bottom of my broken teen girl heart.

To those who helped shape me: Georgie Cook, Ellen Southard, Arnie Erickson, Carol ­Calvert, Ted Carlson, Antonio Beecroft, John Dembski, Michael Uhlenkott, Peggy S., Lynn P., and the entire crew over at SSHS circa 2001–2004.

And to my gramz, Marguerite O’Connell, who told me when I was little that I must always start my stories with something attention-grabbing. Hopefully I lived up to her advice.

Born in a backwoods cabin to a pair of punk rockers, TESS SHARPE grew up in rural California. Following an internship with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, she studied theater at Southern Oregon University before abandoning the stage for the professional kitchen. She lives, bakes, and writes near the Oregon border. This is her first novel. Visit her online at www.tess-sharpe.com.