The Confession That Is Not a Plan
The night before the party Parker came back for the keys he’d left on the Flynns’ counter, and the house was dark but for the blue of a laptop down the hall. Merritt was on the floor of his stripped room, back against the bare mattress, the screen open to the enrollment portal with the cursor sitting on CONFIRM and not moving. He didn’t perform when Parker came in. He didn’t rearrange his face or reach for the joke. He looked up, caught, and looked back at the screen.
“It’s a button,” Merritt said. “I’ve pressed a thousand buttons.”
Parker sat down beside him against the mattress, shoulder to shoulder, and looked at the one word with him. The whole future was behind it.
“Everybody keeps congratulating me,” Merritt said, “like I’m not allowed to be scared. Like being scared means I’m not grateful for it. And I am grateful, I worked for this, I want it—I just keep thinking the second I press it, it’s true, and then I have to go be a person who did this.” He breathed. The cursor blinked. “And I don’t get to say any of that out loud, because everybody’s so proud.”
Parker didn’t tell him it would be fine. He didn’t reach over and press it for him. He sat with his shoulder against Merritt’s in the blue light of the dismantled room and said, “You don’t have to press it tonight.”
“No,” Merritt said. “I know.” And he didn’t, and they sat there a while with the future waiting under the cursor, and then Parker drove home, and neither of them said the scared thing out loud again until the dock.
The Flynns threw the send-off on the second-to-last Saturday, in the backyard, with a cooler and a folding table and the citronella candles that never worked. Half the town came through, because Merritt was the kind of kid a town like this was proud of, the one who got out, the proof that getting out could be done. People kept saying it. That was the thing Parker hadn’t braced for. They said it to Merritt with a hand on his shoulder—you’re getting out, look at you, getting out—as though the town were a wreck they were all going down with and Merritt had found the one seat in the one boat. Every time they said it, it landed somewhere else. It landed on Parker. Because if Merritt was getting out, then Parker was the thing you got out from.
The town came at Parker the way it always did, in pieces of who he used to be. Mrs. Adler, who’d taught them both fourth grade and still saw the nine-year-olds under the men, held his face in both hands and told him he’d grown up handsome and steady, steady, the word landing on him like a verdict. The Honce kid, who’d thrown the beer cooler off the float a hundred years ago, was selling insurance now and shook Parker’s hand too long and said they should grab a beer sometime, the way men say it when they both know they won’t. And old Ruiz, who’d worked the line at the plant with Parker’s father before the plant closed and the father left, found Parker by the fence and didn’t say anything about any of that, just stood next to him a minute looking at the party and said, “Your dad could’ve stayed and been half the man you are. You know that.” And walked off before Parker could answer, which was a mercy, because Parker didn’t have one.
That was the town. It held every earlier version of you at once and handed them back without asking which you wanted. Merritt got it easier—the town’s memory of Merritt was a clean upward line, the smart Flynn kid made good—but Parker’s was a knot, the boy whose dad left, the one who stayed, the one who turned out steady, steady, and every handshake tightened the knot a little, and he loved these people and he could not breathe.
He was at the cooler when Merritt’s uncle said it. A big man, a few beers in, meaning nothing by it, clapping Parker on the back hard enough to rock him. “Good for the kid, huh. Smart. Not like some of us. Some of us were always gonna stay put.” And he laughed, friendly, and wandered off toward the burgers, and Parker stood with his hand in the ice and understood that the man hadn’t even been cruel. He’d only said the thing the whole town thought and was too polite to say to your face, the thing Parker said to himself at two in the morning. Some of us were always gonna stay put. As though it were a flatness in you. As though it were the absence of a thing other people were born with.
Parker put his unopened beer back in the ice and walked out of the party. Nobody saw him go, which was its own fact about his life. He got in the truck and drove to the lake, because there was nowhere else his body knew to take a thing like this, and he went out to the end of the dock and sat with his feet over the black water and didn’t cry, only sat out there with the whole weight of it and no one to hand it to, and after a while he heard the truck again—his own truck, Merritt had lifted the keys off the seat—and then footsteps coming down the boards, and Merritt lowered himself down beside him without a word and pressed a warm beer into his hand.
They sat. Out past the light the float knocked against its chain.
“My uncle’s an idiot,” Merritt said.
“He’s not wrong, though.”
“He’s an idiot, Parker.”
“I’m staying put.” Parker said it to the water. “That part’s just true. Call it whatever you want. I’m twenty-one and I work at a hardware store and I’ll be here when you come back at Christmas and I’ll be here the Christmas after, and you’ll be building bridges in—wherever, and that’s good, that’s right, that’s how it’s supposed to—“ His voice did something he hadn’t authorized, and he shut it down. “I’m not getting out. There’s no out for me. There’s Cole’s swim meets and the gas bill and my mom’s knees. That’s the whole map.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what.”
“Make it small so it stops hurting. You always do it—you flatten it out, the gas bill, my mom’s knees, like it’s nothing, like you’re nothing.” Merritt’s voice cracked open down the middle. “You held a hurricane off a box of my books. You know to the dollar what Cole spent on a knife. You carry an entire family up a hill every day of your life and you crack a joke about propane while you do it, and you’ve decided I’m the impressive one because I filled out a form correctly.”
Parker said nothing. He couldn’t. The thing in his chest had outgrown any sentence he could get around it.
“I’m scared out of my mind,” Merritt said, lower. “That’s the part nobody gets to say at the party. Everybody’s so proud, and I’m going to drive eleven hours up there in three weeks and not know a single face, and it’ll be dark by four in the afternoon, and I’m going to be alone in a way I have never once in my life been alone, because I have always, always had—“ He stopped. The stop. But this time he didn’t pull back from it. He turned in the dark and looked at Parker and said it. “I’ve had you. My whole life I’ve had you a phone call away, and I’m about to not, and I keep telling everybody I can’t wait to go, and the truth is I’m terrified I built this whole future out of leaving the one person who actually—“ His voice gave out under him.
“Say it,” Parker said. He hadn’t known he was going to. It came up out of him low and shaking. “Just once. So I’m not the only one who—“
“I love you,” Merritt said. “Okay? I’ve loved you in every single version of leaving I ever ran in my head. I’d lie awake up there last year planning my whole life and you were in all of it, you were the part I couldn’t engineer out, and I gave up trying to. I love you. I’ve loved you since this dock. I just never once figured out how to want you and want the future at the same time, like they were the same size and I only had the room for one of them.”
The water moved against the pilings. Parker heard himself breathe.
“I don’t want you to go,” Parker said.
It was out before he could stop it, the thing he’d sworn he would never let loose, and the second it hit the air he was already hauling it back, already ashamed, already a selfish man at a cooler. “I—forget that, that’s not fair, I know it’s not fair, you have to go, you should go, I’d never actually ask you to—“ The words came fast, falling over each other, undoing the truth as quick as he’d said it. “I’d never ask you to stay. That’d make me the guy who—I just. You asked me to say it so it’d be true for both of us. And it’s true. I don’t want you to go. And also you have to. And I can hold both of those, I’ve held both of those all summer, I’m fine, I’m—“
“Parker. Parker.” Merritt had his hand on the back of Parker’s neck now, the same as the driveway in July, and he leaned their foreheads together in the dark, and Parker stopped talking. “You’re allowed to want me to stay. Wanting me to stay isn’t the same as making me. You know that, right. You can want a thing and not turn it into somebody’s cage. You’ve never once in your life made anything a cage—that’s the whole—God, you’re so scared of taking up room you’d have let me drive off thinking you didn’t care.”
“I care,” Parker said, wrecked, into the inch between them. “You know I care.”
“I know,” Merritt said. “I finally know.”
And then the kiss, and it wasn’t a victory, it didn’t feel like winning a single thing, it felt like the opposite—like grief got a body for a second and the body was this, two people at the end of a dock at the end of a summer kissing for the first time and the last time at once, the future already standing out in the gravel lot with its keys in its hand. Salt and warm beer and two years of it wasn’t nothing. It was a careful kiss, and when it ended they didn’t pull apart, they stayed forehead to forehead breathing the same square foot of air, and the terrible thing, the true thing, was that nothing was solved. The plane ticket was still real. The boxes were still taped. They’d finally told the truth and the truth couldn’t drive Merritt to Michigan or pay Parker’s gas bill or hold the summer open one extra day. All it could do was make the ending honest.
“This doesn’t fix it,” Parker said.
“No.”
“You’re still going.”
“I’m still going.” Merritt’s thumb moved against the back of his neck. “I don’t know how to not go, Parker. I wish I could tell you I figured it out walking down the dock. I didn’t. I just couldn’t let you sit out here believing you were nothing to me. I couldn’t carry that up there with the boxes.”
“Okay,” Parker said.
“Okay.”
They stayed on the dock until the candles at the party had burned down and the cars had all pulled out, and they didn’t make a plan, because there wasn’t one.
One Week Left
They gave themselves the last week. Nobody named it out loud, but that was what it became—a week stolen out of the middle of the ending and spent, by agreement neither of them spoke, telling the truth, since the worst of it was already said and there was nothing left to guard.
It was nothing anyone would have filmed.
Monday it was the depot run two towns over, the special-order brackets, and on the way back Merritt fell asleep in the passenger seat with his head against the glass, mouth open, twenty-two years old and wrung out from folding a life into cardboard, and Parker drove five miles under the limit so it would last and took the long road past the silos for no reason except that it added eleven minutes. He didn’t wake him. He drove with one hand and watched the road and, once, at a red light, let himself look over at Merritt asleep and undefended in the seat that had been his since they were sixteen, and the wanting in him that week had stopped being a wound and become something quieter and worse, a kind of grieving you do in advance, with the person still warm and breathing right beside you.
Tuesday his mother knew, the way mothers know. She didn’t make it a conversation. She set a fourth place at dinner without being asked, and on the Thursday she made the lemon thing Merritt had loved since he was nine and set it down in front of him without a word, and Merritt looked at the plate and then up at her, and Parker watched his friend understand he was being told we see it, we see you two, it’s allowed, in the only language Parker’s mother had ever trusted, which was food. “Thank you, Mrs. Wold,” Merritt said, in a voice that didn’t hold quite level, and she squeezed his shoulder on her way to the stove, and that was the whole of the blessing.
Wednesday Dani caught them at the stove, Merritt’s hand on the back of Parker’s neck while the eggs went, and she stopped on the bottom stair, sixteen and sharp as a tack, and looked at the two of them, and Parker braced for whatever was coming. His sister only looked a beat longer at Merritt’s hand on the back of Parker’s neck, and then said, “The eggs are burning,” and got the orange juice out of the fridge and went out the door to practice, and that was the entire coming-out of it, swallowed whole by an ordinary morning, and Parker loved her so hard in that second he had to turn back to the pan so she wouldn’t see his face do what it did.
Friday Parker got off at two and they had the lake to themselves in the daylight, which never happened, which felt stolen. The families came in the evenings; at two on a weekday there was only the heat coming off the water and the dock boards soft and warm underfoot, and they swam out to the float in the full sun this time, no dark to hide in, and lay on it dripping with the light pressing down on them, and it was different in the day. At night the lake let you pretend. In the day there was just Merritt’s shoulder a finger’s width from his, freckled and real, and the water sound, and the whole bright fact of it. Merritt reached over without looking, the same as the first night, and found the cooler scar on Parker’s shin and pressed it, two fingers, except this time he didn’t take his hand back. He left it on Parker’s leg in the sun, and Parker watched a hawk turn over the far trees and didn’t move and didn’t breathe wrong, and they lay there a long time not saying anything, the float rocking under them, two boys in the middle of a lake in the middle of a Friday with the world’s whole weight of summer light on them and eight days left.
“I keep trying to memorize it,” Merritt said, to the sky. “This. I keep going, remember this, remember exactly this, and then I get scared I’m doing it wrong, that I’m going to remember the remembering instead of the thing.” He turned his head. “Is that—do you do that?”
“All the time,” Parker said. “All summer. From a few feet behind myself.”
“Yeah.” Merritt looked back up at the blue. “Yeah. That.”
They swam back in slow and used the one towel between them, the same as always, except now there was no pretending it was nothing, and so when the cotton came up over both their heads in the bright two-o’clock air, faces close, water running off them, Merritt kissed him under the towel, slow, salt on both their mouths, in the daylight, where the only witness was the empty lake. It was a kiss with no clock in it for exactly as long as it lasted, and then the clock came back, the way it would for a thousand miles and ten months and however much longer after that they could keep this from becoming a thing they used to do. They drove home with wet hair and the windows down, and Parker took the long road past the silos, and neither of them said why.
It was holding hands in the truck where the console hid it, Merritt’s fingers laced through his at every red light and let go before they rolled, a thing that lived only in the gaps between motion. It was the porch after his shifts, shoulder to shoulder on the steps, not even talking, Merritt’s leg warm along his, the citronella finally lit and finally working, doing its one job for once in its life.
One of those mornings—the sky not even grey yet—Parker came down for the 6 a.m. open and the kitchen light was already on. Merritt stood at the stove in yesterday’s shirt with his hair flat on one side, scraping at a pan, and smoke was lifting off the toaster, two slices gone past brown to black.
“You’re awake,” Parker said. Merritt had never once met 6 a.m. on purpose in his life.
“I’m making you breakfast.” He said it like a dare. “Don’t look at the toast.”
Parker looked at the toast. It was past saving. He sat down at the table anyway, under the two-color calendar with his shifts in black and the family in red, the house quiet over them, Cole and Dani and his mother all still asleep, and Merritt set a plate in front of him—eggs overcooked and broken, the black toast scraped at with a knife in a way that had only moved the burn around—and sat across from him with his elbows on the table, watching Parker take the first bite like he’d staked something on it.
Parker ate the toast. All of it. He ate the bad eggs and the burnt toast in the grey kitchen at six in the morning while the boy who’d made them watched him do it, and it was the nearest thing to a life he had ever wanted, this exact ordinary thing, the two of them at a table with the day not yet started and no one else awake. He understood it even then, chewing scorched bread: this was the one he’d want back. Not the dock. Not the kiss. This. The toast.
Then the day came on. His phone went off with the alarm for the open. Merritt’s boxes were stacked by the front door where Parker would have to step around them on his way out. The life they were playing at had a clock bolted to the underside of it, and Parker rinsed his plate and kissed Merritt once at the door, toast and all, and went to open the store.
The cruelty was that knowing it was love didn’t shrink it down to something he could carry off and survive. It made it bigger. Before, he’d been losing a maybe. Now he was losing a fact. And he wouldn’t have traded back—he’d lain awake on the narrow bed with Merritt’s breath gone slow beside him and asked himself, honestly, whether he’d rather have never known, rather have let Merritt drive off believing it was nothing, and the answer came back no, never. He’d take the heavier grief every time before he’d let Merritt go north not knowing he was loved.
The last night, the room was already gone. That was the thing that undid him. They lay on the narrow bed in what had been Merritt’s room and was now just a room, the walls bare of the band posters and the swim ribbons and the periodic table he’d had up since he was twelve, the closet open and empty, the boxes all gone ahead in his mother’s car or stacked by the front door for morning, and the room had the sound a room gets when it’s stopped being anybody’s, that flat echo, and they lay in it shoulder to shoulder in the dark and didn’t sleep.
“I can hear the room being empty,” Merritt said.
“I know.”
“It’s so loud.” He found Parker’s hand in the dark between them and held it, not the red-light way, the let-go-before-it-counts way, but the whole way, fingers laced and staying. “Tell me something true. So the last thing isn’t this echo.”
Parker lay there with his friend’s hand in his and the bare walls around them, and reached for something true that wouldn’t ask for anything, that wouldn’t be a hook in Merritt’s coat the whole drive north. “When you used to leave for school,” he said, “the first couple years. I’d drive past your house. Not even meaning to. I’d just end up on your street, and the green car would be gone, and I’d—I don’t know. I’d feel better, just seeing the house. Like part of you was keeping the place.” He breathed. “I’m going to drive past a lot, this fall.”
Merritt didn’t answer for a moment. Then he turned and pressed his face into the side of Parker’s neck, and Parker felt the wet there, and didn’t say anything about it, because some things you let a person do in the dark in an empty room without naming them, and they stayed like that until the window went grey, and neither of them ever said they hadn’t slept.