Chapter 17: Departure

Age 18 | June - July

The ceremony was outside on the south lawn, folding chairs in rows under a Thursday afternoon sky that kept changing its mind about the clouds.

I sat in the H row between a boy named Harmon I’d never spoken to and Jenna, who’d been crying since the parking lot and wasn’t embarrassed about it. Four seats down Madison sat with her hands folded in her lap, cap slightly crooked, looking at the temporary stage with the expression of someone already three states away and being patient about the formalities.

We’d found each other in the staging area beforehand. The noise moving around us — caps adjusting, phones out, parents calling from the edges. We stood together in it without needing to do anything about it.

“Oregon in August,” she said.

“Iowa in September,” I said.

We looked at each other.

“We’re going to be fine,” Madison said.

“Yeah,” I said. “We are.”

I meant it completely. I could tell she did too. Whether either of us was right was a different question and we both knew that and neither of us said it, which was one of the things I loved about her.

My parents were somewhere in the audience, on opposite sides of the lawn. I’d spotted them during the processional — Dad toward the left, third row, Mom further back and to the right. Not hostile. Not coordinated. Just the permanent shape of two lives that had separated into parallel lines and occasionally shared the same room. They didn’t arrange it. They simply arrived where they arrived.

When my name was called I walked across the stage, shook the principal’s hand, took the diploma. The afternoon light came through a break in the clouds at exactly that moment and for a few seconds everything was very bright and very slow and then I was down the stairs and back in my row and Jenna was gripping my arm with both hands, still crying.

After, the crowd broke into its smaller pieces. I found my parents separately.

Mom was near the big oak at the south edge of the lawn. When she saw me coming she turned to the woman standing next to her — a stranger, someone’s family, someone’s aunt — and asked without self-consciousness if she’d mind. The stranger was happy to. These moments made strangers happy.

Mom put her arms around me before we posed. One hand at the back of my head the way she’d done since I was small. I felt her heartbeat against my cheek. Felt her trying to memorize something she knew she couldn’t keep.

“Ready?” the stranger said.

We smiled. The shutter clicked.

Mom held on a second longer before she let go.

Then Dad. Same oak, same light. The stranger was still nearby and took the phone again without being asked twice. He stood beside me with his hand on my shoulder and smiled for the camera and when the phone was handed back he looked at me.

Just looked.

The house was already on the market. The Iowa City lease already signed. Oxford six weeks out. Everything already in motion — the dismantling already underway, the new life already taking shape in a city neither of us had lived in yet — and he was standing on this lawn in the June light looking at me from inside the middle of everything he’d already done, and I felt the full weight of it move through my chest the way very large things moved when they finally arrived all at once.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

I nodded slightly. So did he.

Then Jenna was pulling me by the arm toward the group forming twenty feet away, laughing and crying simultaneously the way only Jenna could manage, and I went with her, and when I looked back once before the parking lot both my parents were still on their separate sides of the lawn, each absorbed in separate conversations, each doing what you did at the end of something.

The clouds made their final decision and the sun came through and stayed.

Three weeks later. My eighteenth birthday.

He made my favorite dinner. Steak, rare, the garlic bread I’d stopped pretending I didn’t want. The table set properly, candle lit, a bottle of wine open and poured into two glasses without discussion because I was eighteen now and that was that.

The gift was small — a book, first edition, cloth cover worn soft at the corners, the author I’d been reading and rereading since junior year. He’d found it at an estate sale in April and kept it until today. Inside the front cover, one line in his handwriting. I read it twice and didn’t read it aloud.

We ate. Talked about the ceremony, about Jenna crying since the parking lot, about the light coming through the clouds at exactly the right moment. He refilled my glass without asking. I told him about Madison in the staging area and he listened the way he always listened — fully, not preparing his response while I was still talking.

After dinner I cleared the plates and he came up behind me at the sink. His hands at my waist first, then sliding up under my shirt, spreading warm across my stomach.

I turned off the water.

“What day are you on?” he asked. Against my neck.

I turned around in his arms.

Looked at him directly.

“I stopped tracking,” I said.

His breath changed against my face. Not surprise exactly — more like something he’d been half-expecting arriving all at once. His eyes stayed on mine and I watched something move through them, a door opening onto a room that had always been there.

He took my hand and we left the dishes where they were.

In the bedroom he undressed me slowly. My shirt first, then my bra, and he stepped back with his hands still warm on my shoulders and looked at me — that quality of attention that had never once become ordinary, that I still felt move across my skin like something physical.

His eyes moved to my breasts and he made the sound low in his throat. The involuntary one. His hands came up and cupped me, full and deliberate, his thumbs moving in slow circles, and I felt my nipples harden against his palms and leaned into him without deciding to.

His mouth found me and I put my hand in his hair and held on.

By the time he laid me back I was already unsteady. He took his time — mouth at my throat, my ribs, the soft skin below my hip. I watched his face move over me with that focused unhurried attention and felt the familiar tightening low in my stomach, my body already knowing what was coming and moving toward it.

When he settled between my thighs and pressed forward I felt the stretch — that specific fullness building as he pushed deeper, the thick weight of him spreading me open. He bottomed out and I felt it all the way to my cervix, a bright sharp pressure, and I watched his face when it happened.

His jaw tightened.

He pulled back and drove forward harder and I understood: the knowledge of it — I stopped tracking, those three words still live between us — was doing something to him he wasn’t controlling. The pressure sharpened. I grabbed the sheets.

“Don’t stop,” I said.

He didn’t.

His rhythm built and I tilted my hips to take him deeper and the pressure against my cervix sharpened further and I stopped trying to be quiet.

I waited for it. The words. The specific low rough register his voice dropped into when he lost control — fill you up, pump you full, knock you up — the whole breeding talk that lived between us at exactly this moment, that my body had learned to anticipate the way you anticipated a chord you’d heard a thousand times.

It didn’t come.

He moved harder and said nothing and I felt the silence where the words should have been and something happened in my chest — a dropping sensation, like a floor giving way, except it didn’t feel like falling. It felt like landing.