Chapter Text
AGE 17
That first night, Jeremiah and Steven and Conrad conference out by the pool. Conrad can see Belly’s silhouette in the upstairs window, and he wonders if they should have asked her to join them.
“I mean, it’s going to be kind of epic,” Steven says. “Right?” A touch of uncertainty to it. “We’re practically brothers already.”
It had been just like his mother to announce it all at the same time: the divorce, her coming out, the upcoming wedding, Steven and Belly and Laurel moving in with them in Boston in the fall after they’re back from Cousins. Their summer family for the rest of their lives.
She’d done it the night before, so when the Park/Conklins arrive, Conrad and Jeremiah were still reeling with it.
Laurel’s been divorced for a year though, enough time for the fact of it to sink in. “What’s your dad say?” Conrad says.
“I mean, I don’t think he was surprised. He’s always known how they were.”
The light is on in the kitchen and Conrad can see the two of them at the sink, looking out at the beach beyond, their heads, one dark and one fair, bent together as they talk, no different from any other summer. They’re making brownies for their movie night.
“You don’t think maybe they’re joking?” Jeremiah says. “I mean she’s not just going to leave Dad. Right? She wouldn’t do that.”
“Come on,” Conrad says. “Let’s just go to the bonfire.”
They come back two hours later, supporting Jeremiah between them. Conrad drops him in bed, leaving him a trash bin, and then goes out onto the back porch. Belly is outside swimming laps. He watches her cut through the water, pausing at the far end, where she lies in shadows.
“Conrad?” she says, squinting at him from the side of the pool.
He bends and picks her glasses up from the side and deposits them on her face. “You all right?” he asks her.
She wrinkles her nose. “Are you drunk? You smell like puke.”
“No,” he says, honestly. “Jere had a little too much though.”
She pushes upwards so that they’re sitting side by side on the ledge. She’s shivering a little in the cool air.
She isn’t looking at him anymore, but out towards the beach. He wants to ask her what she thinks about the whole thing; but he can’t find the words. It had been easier with the boys.
“We’ll still come here every summer, right?” she asks, at last.
He ruffles her wet hair. “Duh,” he says. “We’ll come here forever. Till we’re all wrinkled with great-grandkids. You, me, Steve, Jere.”
She nods and tilts her head back to look at the stars. She has that sort of gangly look about her, not quite grown into anything yet. It makes her somehow seem more fragile than she had even a year before. Family, Conrad thinks. It doesn’t feel wrong.
.
Two days later, the boys decide to do a barbecue. Conrad is tasked with setting up the grill, while Jeremiah and Steven hunt for the coal. Laurel finds him messing around with the ignition. She’s silent in her approach and he doesn’t know how long she’s been standing there before he notices her.
“A little help?” he says.
“I’m better at take out,” she says, wryly.
He laughs, and raises a hand to his hair, awkward suddenly in her presence, as if she were a stranger.
“I’m sorry Beck just sprung it on you. I told her she should have told you months ago. As soon as we decided.”
He wonders if she did the same, if Belly and Steven have known this whole time, while he and Jere have been living a fake life. He frowns at the thought.
“I’d understand if you were angry. You have every right.”
But Conrad can’t imagine being angry with Laurel, not really. And ever since his mother got sick and then better again, he can’t find it within himself to be angry with her much either. At Adam then? For not what? Keeping them apart? That seems wrong, too.
“I’m just… surprised.”
“Adam will always be your father, you know. We’re not trying to erase him, and he’ll still be very present. He wants that. I just hope it’s all right with you that I will be, too.”
“Laurel,” Conrad says, not sure what else to say, so he just nods.
She steps forward and hugs him, hard, around the neck, and then steps away, raising a hand to her brow as if suddenly overheated. “Let’s leave the grill,” she says. “We’ll do the meat on the stovetop.”
.
The summer inevitably gets taken over by the wedding. There is always stuff sprawled on the main table, catalogs and fabric sample books and catering menus, little bits of dried flowers and tulle gift bags stuffed with almonds. “We’ve both already been married,” Laurel says. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”
“I intend this to be my last wedding,” Susannah says. “So it’s going to be perfect. You don’t get a say in the matter.”
Susannah wants the boys to all be joint ringbearers and Belly to be the flower girl. She sends them into town for matching suit fittings, which is a bit mortifying, though Conrad supposes he can use it for prom in the spring. She picks out Belly’s dress, too, a froofy pink thing she looks miserable in.
Laurel insists on not wearing white—as, she says, that ship had sailed with the passing of two kids—and that they hold it at the house instead of at the country club, like Susannah had originally suggested. The guest list, too, is negotiated down to less than a hundred. This should mean that the day of is calmer, but the morning still feels supercharged, like a million things have gone wrong at once. The hot water heater breaks in the early morning hours and Steven rips a seam in the crotch of his pants. Susannah’s dress has a burn mark from the dry cleaners. Belly has cramps and Conrad finds her curled in bed with a heating pad fully dressed, her hair in a half-hearted attempt at an updo.
She lifts her head. “Is it time?
“Just escaping the madness. Can I get you anything?”
She flushes, and then looks down at the floor. There’s a moroseness to her that’s surprising. Belly is generally cheery.
”Doesn’t it sort of feel like everything is ending?” she says. “Aren’t weddings supposed to be about beginnings?”
He shrugs. He’s not sure yet what he thinks of weddings. Or about endings and beginnings. He knows that if it had been anyone other than Laurel marrying his mom, he would be out of his mind with worry about the future. But he does know her and he…loves her.
Even so, the feelings produced are complicated.
“I don’t think they’d be doing it, if they felt like they had any other choice.”
She blinks at him. “Is that what love is then?”
It’s charming, in its way, that she thinks he knows. That to Belly, he can still be someone who has all the answers. He doesn’t really know about this, though he’s dated girls before; but he tells her what he believes. “I think,” he says. “That love doesn’t have a beginning or ending. It’s infinite.”
She smiles at that. “Right,” she says. “I remember.”
.
Despite the general ruckus of the morning, it all gets sorted. Steven’s pants sewn up, the unshowered shuttled over to the motel, Susannah’s burn mark covered with a floral applique. The day is bright and clear and beautiful, and his mother looks luminous smiling down at Laurel. It makes Conrad wonder if he’s ever really seen her happy before. She hadn’t ever looked at his dad like that.
After the ceremony, they play music out in the yard. They’d set up white tents in case it rained, and they’re all strung with lights, a floor laid out for dancing with little high top tables and canapes. He finds Belly at one, eating shrimp cocktail. He snags one from her plate.
“Did Susannah ask you to ask me to dance?” she asks him, suspiciously. “Because she tried that with Jere already.”
Conrad scoffs a laugh. “She’s been a bit busy.”
He nods his head to where Susannah and Laurel are dancing in the center of the room, rotating around each other, lost in their own little world. It’s a slow song, sweet and romantic. He looks over at Belly, suddenly curious. “Do you want to?”
“The song’s almost over.”
He holds out his hand. “We could do it anyway.”
She hesitates for a moment, and then she takes it, and he leads her out onto the dance floor.
AGE EIGHTEEN
In March, Tucker’s parents go out of town and he throws a house party. Belly comes with her volleyball friends this time, not even with the boys. Conrad can see her from his spot in the kitchen. Though he can’t hear what she’s saying, she talks animatedly, like it takes her whole face to do it. The fact that the person she’s talking to is Ben Cho inexplicably annoys him.
“You can’t stare at her all night, Con,” Aubrey says. This is the third time she’s said it. “She’s pretty. Guys are going to notice. You can’t just stand over her and wave them off with a stick.”
The idea doesn’t sound too bad to him at the moment. “She’s fifteen,” he says. “Ben is our age. It’s weird.”
“It’s not a crime to date a sophomore. Or to talk to one at a party. Jesus, Conrad.”
He can tell she’s tired of this topic and that he should change it; but his eyes search out Belly again, almost against his will.
Pretty isn’t the first word Conrad would use to describe her. He has a good memory. When he thinks of her, it’s an amalgamation of her at a million ages. Eight and whiny, thirteen and earnest, ten and… really bad on a bike. She’s funny and intensely competitive and a bit of a bitch. She eats too much sugar and hogs the radio. He knows her too well to find her pretty.
And yet, his gaze is still lingering on her. The smile has dropped from her face, and without a thought, Conrad is pushing his way through the crowd of people towards her.
“Conrad!” Aubrey calls to his back.
He touches Belly on the elbow. “You good?”
She smiles up at him, before looking sideways at Ben. “Just uh need some air.”
Conrad glares at Ben in a silent message to back off, and then helps her out onto the patio. People are out there smoking pot, and Belly’s nose wrinkles.
Same old Belly.
He cuffs her on the back of her head, and she blinks, owlish, up at him. She has been drinking a bit, he thinks. She looks looser somehow.
It’s a brisk night, snow still topping all the patio furniture, and she’s just wearing a lace trimmed tank top that Conrad has put effort into not looking at too closely. “I’m fine,” she says at his look. But Conrad is already peeling off his sweater and offering it to her.
The cold bites into him quickly. Still, “Take it,” he says, holding it out for her.
She pulls it on, her hair all caught in the collar, and he laughs and helps her pull it out.
“Now you’re cold,” she says, looking up at him, and then she steps forward and loops her arms around his waist, her face burrowing into his neck. He makes a surprised sound. Her nose is cold. But the rest of her is warm.
The guys smoking look up at them though—Frank Woods, leering—and Conrad really doesn’t want this to cause drama. “Belly, come on,” he says. “Lets just go in. Or if you’re tired, I’ll drive you home.”
Her hands spasm on his back, like she’s clutching him closer. Conrad puts his hands to her shoulders and gently pries her off him.
Even so, they’re standing near enough that he can see her face in close up, her eyes, wide-eyed and fixed just on him.
Fuck, but pretty isn’t the word for her at all.
.
One of the benefits of being a senior is that Conrad can sign himself out if need be; so on a day that he has a raging headache, he takes off at lunch, thinking he can just sleep it off and he’ll be well enough for his bio test the next day. He comes in the back—Laurel doesn’t really like writing at home so she’s rarely there during the day and his mom never is—so he’s surprised to hear voices in the living room. Both of them would scold him for taking off school without permission so he moves slowly, barely breathing for fear of discovery; but halfway up the stairs, he pauses.
Laurel is crying.
He can just see into the living room from this angle. His mom’s hand is on Laurel’s back, rubbing circles. Conrad has never seen Laurel cry. She has always seemed immensely steady. It had been calming to him to know someone that it felt like even an earthquake would not move.
“Should I not have told you?” Susannah was saying, a quiet murmur.
Laurel rubs at her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She pushes to sitting. “And you’re sure there’s nothing I can say? To change your mind?”
Susannah sighs. “We always knew this was a possibility, Laur. I said last time that I just wanted to live. Live honestly. And I have, honey. I have .”
Laurel makes a wounded sound. It is an intensely private noise, and Conrad wishes instantly that he had never heard it. He wishes he were not standing there now; but he can’t seem to make his feet move. Someone might have glued his feet to the steps.
“How long?”
“A year? If I’m lucky.”
“And with the treatment?”
“Laur—”
“Just tell me what they said.”
“They said in all likelihood treatment wouldn’t make a difference. I don’t want to do it, honey.”
“I’ll come with you to the next appointment. We’ll speak to them together. I want to hear. You can give me that, Beck.”
Susannah exhales. “Okay. Okay. But I want to go to the summer house. One last summer, don’t you think? We’ll tell the children afterwards.”
“Susannah—”
“One last perfect summer. There will be plenty of time to be sad about it later, I promise.”
Somehow Conrad does make his feet move then: up the stairs and into his room where he pulls the covers up and gets in, lying there, not sleeping, not moving, not…anything.
It passes dinner time, and he hears a knock on the door. “Connie?” Laurel pokes her head in. “I wasn’t sure you were up here. Have you eaten?”
He knows how to do things. Speak, nod, breath. He’s known them all his life until this moment. She comes and sits on the bed, putting her hand to his forehead. “You don’t feel hot,” she says. “But you look awful. You want something? Soup?”
He shakes his head, minutely, and she leaves. Some time later, there’s another knock on the door, and then there’s Belly, her hair up in a messy bun, hoisting a tray on her hip. “My mom made you porridge,” she says. “It’s a Park specialty. One of the only.”
She makes to come forward; but at the look on his face, she just leaves it on the dresser.
He’s scared her, he thinks. But maybe that’s not true. Because for a moment, she stays there, lingering in the doorway. She seems very far away, as if Conrad is seeing her through water, the sight of her waving with the rise and fall of his eyes. “Conrad?” she says.
There aren’t words for it, so he just closes his eyes, and in what seems like only a moment, she’s gone.
.
Aubrey breaks up with him. She does it at the Steak N Shake drive thru, which he guesses is better than over text.
“I really don’t understand you,” she says. “Like I seriously don’t.”
“Okay.”
“That’s all you’re going to say?”
“Do you want me to argue with you?”
She looks at him for a long moment, and then exhales in a huff, pulling her seat belt back on. “Just drive me home, Conrad.”
He does, but she doesn’t immediately get out of the car and he wonders if the break up is ongoing. “Is this because of Belly?” she says, finally, as if this is something she has been working up to.
“Is what because of Belly?” He frowns. “You’re the one who is breaking up with me.”
“That’s because whenever I see you now it’s like you’re not even there. Are you like star-crossed pining for her or something?”
Conrad recoils. “Jesus, no.”
“Because Frank said he saw you like embracing at that party—”
“He did not say the word embracing.”
“He did.”
Conrad thinks about it, and feels like something is sitting on his chest, a sudden intense pressure, accompanied by a wild jolt of fear that goes all the way down to his bones. “What’s happening?” he says. Like it was some external force pressing in on him.
He feels Aubrey’s hand on his elbow, can hear her voice saying his name, though it sounds hollow and distant.
He inhales, and then forgets how to exhale. “Breathe,” Aubrey says. “Come on, Conrad. Just breathe”
Breathe, Conrad thinks. How can he when he knows now that breaths are numbered?
AGE NINETEEN
Conrad comes home for Christmas. They all know it’s the last Christmas, though no one says it. Christmas Eve, he and Susannah sit together on the couch and do the crossword. It’s easier somehow than speaking. Neither of them have ever been good at soul conversations.
Halfway through the Sunday though, she puts her hand on his wrist, and he looks up at her.
Her eyes are shiny with tears. “I knew when I married Laurel that it might not be forever. But I thought at least I would have drawn this family together. You and Belly and Jere and Steven. And Laurel. You’ll look after them, won’t you, Connie? You always were good at that.”
“Of course,” Conrad says, though he thinks, it’s you they need. Not me.
Afterwards, he goes to get his mom tea and finds Belly at the main table, working on homework. He places a hand on her shoulder, and she looks up at him, and smiles. She looks tired, worn thin. “She’s getting sentimental,” she says.
“Yeah,” Conrad agrees. “Well, it’s Christmas.”
Tears flood her eyes automatically at the words, and she places her hand over her face as if to hide it. Conrad thinks that he’d very much like it if after this year he never saw her cry again.
Maybe it would help him if he cried, too, but he can’t seem to make himself do it. Instead it just builds inside his chest, like a pulsing need inside him. There is nowhere to put it.
.
In March it gets bad and they move his mom to the sunroom so that she doesn’t have to go up the stairs. This way, too, they reason, she can watch the flowers bloom. But by the time the first bloom comes, she’s already dead.
.
After the funeral, Conrad finds Laurel in the kitchen. She is bent over the island, the line of her shoulders tensed with emotion, but when she raises herself and looks up at him he sees that she is dry-eyed.
“I’m ordering pizza,” she says. “It should be here in thirty.”
“I think everyone ate at the service.” At her look, he adds, “But I’m sure we would all eat again. Thanks, Laurel.”
Laurel runs her hand over her face into her hair. She looks very small standing there, and, suddenly, it feels strange to be larger than her, like he should still be a little boy, only coming to her waist.
“I’m going to drive back down in the morning,” Conrad says. “I’ll be out of your hair soon.”
“Connie,” she says, and then pauses. “Why don’t you take the week off? I can talk to someone at the school if you want.”
“No,” Conrad says. “I think I want to be working, you know. Moving on. It’s what my mom would have wanted.”
Her lips purse, and she reaches out and touches his shoulder. “All right.” Conrad feels a shiver building in him, like perhaps once it's started, there is no stopping it, and he’ll shake till there is nothing of him left. “This is still your home though, Conrad. You know that, right?”
He nods, though he doesn’t. Though he feels as if the concept of home had died with his mother.
Home was not his dorm room at Brown or Adam’s loft apartment downtown or even really this house they’d moved to after the divorce. When he thinks about it, really thinks about it, home for him will always be the summer house. And how was he meant to ever go back there?
.
In the spring, he finishes his first year of college. Jeremiah and Steven graduate with an empty seat where his mother should have been. At their party, Conrad finds Belly out in the sideyard, smoking a cigarette.
She doesn’t see him at first, and he just stares at her. Her hair is pulled up atop her head, and he can see the graceful line of her neck. She’s wearing a strappy dress, cut loose around the curves of her body, ending at her knee. He tries to think of her at seven; but the image won’t stick.
He coughs, and she looks up at him.
“You’re here,” she says, a smile overtaking her face.
The sight loosens something in him. “I thought you hated smoking.”
“I do,” she admits. She offers him the cigarette and he takes it, tamping it out with his foot on the ground.
“Hey!”
“They’re terrible for you,” he says, putting his hands in his pocket.
She’s silent for a moment, and then she looks over at him, flinty-eyed. “It’s been weird going through this without you here, you know.”
His shoulders raise. “How so?”
“Jeremiah’s spending most of his time at Adam’s now and Steven’s never home. And my mom wants to pretend like nothing’s wrong. My friends,” She sighs, “They’ve tried really hard to be nice about it, but they don’t get it, you know?”
He does know. “It’s only been two months.”
“But she wasn’t even really my mother.” Her lips quirk upwards. “Right?”
Conrad thinks, if she wasn’t your mother, then that means you’re not really my sister . It’s not a helpful thought.
“Come on, Belly,” he says instead.
“Sorry.” She shakes her head. “I was going to be more cheery when I saw you again.”
“You don’t have to pretend to be okay around me.”
“No?” she says. “Like you did last summer?”
“To be fair, I don’t think I did a very good job.”
She laughs, and then covers her mouth. “What’d you think of Steven’s speech?”
He smiles. “I didn’t know he had that much cheese in him.”
“Right?” She grins. “I think Susannah would have liked it though.”
Conrad hums in agreement. When he looks over at Belly again, he finds her already watching him. There is something raw and aching in her eyes that feels horribly familiar.
“Come here,” he says, and reaches down to hug her.
She steps into the embrace. His hand is in her hair, her nose is pressed into his collarbone, and he can feel the shape of her from her chest down to her knees. He should, he thinks, definitely step back, squeeze her tight once, and then release her, lead her back to the party, where the rest of their family is waiting.
He doesn’t.
AGE TWENTY
Belly gets into UMass Boston. She calls him to tell him, and Conrad says that he’ll drive back to take her out to dinner to celebrate. They go to a nice restaurant. Belly wears a blue dress under her winter coat, and gives a little curtsy when he first sees her.
She smiles a lot as they talk, but he isn’t sure he believes her.
“So how is it going?” he asks her once dessert comes. “Just you and Laurel?”
She exhales. “She’s writing again. Finally. But,” her nose wrinkles, “I still don’t think she’s even cried, you know? Like the entire year.”
“Would it make you feel better if she did?”
“Maybe. Is that bad?”
Conrad shrugs. He’s not much of a crier either. And he doesn’t think Laurel is unaffected.
“Like the love of her life is dead, and she just goes on with life? I don’t know. I can’t imagine it.”
Conrad squints at her. He thinks of their conversation at the wedding, and wonders if she knows more about love now. He knows she was dating someone in the fall. That she’s going to date and fall in love and get married, some day. This is a truth he must face, though the thought of it threatens to crumple him.
“Have you talked to her about it?”
She shakes her head, and then puts her hand on his across the table. “I’m so glad you came,” she says. “I miss you, you know?”
“I know,” Conrad says. He misses her, too. More than there are words for.
When they get out to the parking lot, Belly stops, and turns to him. “Can I say something crazy?”
“Always.”
She starts to smile, that all consuming Belly smile. “Do you want to go to Cousins?”
.
Together, Conrad and Belly go around the house turning on lights. He hasn’t been back here since his mom died, and he almost expects Susannah to come from around the corner to the kitchen, like she had just been hiding out here this whole time, waiting for them to come find her.
“Let’s go down to the water,” Belly says, tugging on his sleeve.
It’s late, but Conrad nods, and they walk down through the trees together. It’s always felt magical here, but it's different in the March gloom. The fact that Cousins could feel unfamiliar is shocking. But there it is.
“Look,” Belly says. “It’s snowing.”
Conrad raises his hand and catches a snowflake in his palm. “So it is,” he says. “Make a wish. Or is that eyelashes?” When he looks over at Belly, her eyes are glimmery. She leans over and blows on his palm. “Just in case,” she says, and then offers her ungloved hand up to him.
Conrad takes it.
.
In the morning, they pick up muffins and eat them out at the pool, looking up at the grey sky. “You still dating that guy?” Conrad asks her. “Larry?”
“Lawrence,” Belly says. “And no. He said I was too sad. That I was like harshing his senior spring.”
“What? Fuck him.”
“He wasn’t great anyway.” She eyes him. “What about Abby?”
“We’re just friends.”
“Just friends,” she repeats, wiggling her eyebrows.
“Yes, really, Belly. Boys and girls can be just friends.”
“I’m sure,” she says, picking at her wrapper.
He thinks about saying, I tried with Abby, you know? But the problem was that she wasn’t you. And that was the problem with Aubrey, too, and every other girl I’ve tried to be with since.
None of them were you.
.
Laurel calls Belly in the midafternoon. “I’m with Conrad, mom,” Belly says. There’s a sort of total faith in the way she says it, like it explains everything, that cuts right through his chest and down to his toes. He continues carefully peeling the watermelon, and placing the finished slices into the tupperware. Belly hates the rinds.
They make pasta for dinner that night, and there’s wine from two summers ago down in the cupboards. They pour it into his mom’s special beach wine glasses, Belly frowning at the taste.
“Do I need to add juice to yours?” he asks her.
“Shut up,” she says. Her cheeks are flushed from the alcohol. It makes her look charming.
Afterwards, they watch It Happened One Summer on the couch in the living room. Belly has her chin resting on her arms, totally engaged in the watching, and though she’s seen it who knows how many times at this point, she still cries at the end.
They’re sitting closer than is safe, their thighs pressed together, his hand dangling over the back of the couch, almost brushing against her shoulder, and when the movie finishes, she leans even closer so her hair is tickling his chin.
“Thanks for bringing me here,” he says. They’ve built a fire in the grate and he feels warm and alcohol-soft. Happy, almost. “I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to come back here by myself.”
“We said we’d always come here, yeah?” She shifts so that she can look at him. Her eyes have gone kind of crossed she’s so close to him, and her lips are pink and parted, though he’s not meant to be looking at them.
“Yes,” Conrad agrees. Always, forever.
There is no end or beginning with her.