I Take You Page 15

  “Jesus, Lily. You look terrible.”

  We buy tickets and walk into the main house, a square mansion of creamy stone with tall yellow shutters. About a dozen people are assembled in the living room, waiting for the tour to begin. Freddy and I hang in the back.

  A clock chimes, and a little old lady in a tropical shirt and Bermuda shorts bustles into the room. She has a faded bowl cut and eager eyes. “Welcome, welcome, everyone, to beautiful Key West, Florida, and to the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum!” she cries. “My name is Donna Kuntsmeister—”

  “No way,” Freddy murmurs.

  “—and I’ll be your guide as we go back in time, over eighty years, when the spot where we’re standing right now was the home of one of America’s most prolific, influential and controversial writers.” She looks around dramatically. “Ernest Hemingway.”

  “Why are we here?” Freddy whispers.

  “Hemingway lived in this house for over ten years with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, a journalist and heiress from Parkersburg, Iowa.” Donna beams at us. “Are there any Iowans with us today?”

  “I needed to talk to somebody,” I whisper back.

  “I’m all ears,” Freddy says. “Like that baby over there. Jesus, the poor thing.”

  “—then let’s get started!” Donna cries. “If anyone has questions along the way, please don’t hesitate to pipe up.”

  The group shuffles into the hallway after her. “I have a problem,” I tell Freddy.

  “We are now standing in the Hemingways’ dining room,” Donna announces. “When they were in residence here in Key West, Ernest and Pauline loved to entertain.”

  “Let me guess,” Freddy says. “You mouthed off, and Will’s mom flew into a rage.”

  “That was definitely part of it.”

  “Why do you always do that?” she sighs.

  “Why do I always do everything that I always do?”

  “Nineteen forty,” Donna says, answering a question. “But Pauline lived here until her death in 1951, which occurred after she learned that her son Gregory had been arrested for entering a ladies’ restroom dressed in his wife’s clothing.”

  Freddy blinks. “That is so not where I was expecting her to go with that.”

  “This is a sea chest made of Circassian walnut,” Donna is saying. “Pauline used it as a writing desk.”

  A woman asks, “What’s Circassian walnut?”

  “Some type of wood,” Donna replies.

  “Sounds like something out of Star Wars,” I say.

  The woman nods. “Yeah.”

  “It’s not from Star Wars,” says Donna.

  “Maybe it’s what the Millennium Falcon was made out of,” I say. “Circassian walnut.”

  Donna shakes her head. “It wasn’t.”

  “I heard it was supposed to be called the Circassian Falcon,” I say. “But George Lucas has a lisp, so he couldn’t pronounce it. And he’s the boss, so …”

  The woman says, “George Lucas has a lisp?”

  A man says, “What does this have to do with Hemingway?”

  Donna says, “Let’s move on, shall we?”

  We all follow her into the library. Freddy nudges me. “Are you going to tell me what’s on your mind, or are we here so that you can heckle the docent?”

  “She threatened me,” I whisper.

  “Donna?”

  “Will’s mom! She’s trying to blackmail me.”

  “Pauline bought this chandelier in Paris,” Donna says. “She had it sent all the way here. By boat.”

  “That’s impossible,” Freddy says. “You must have misunderstood her.”

  “Trust me. I heard her loud and clear.”

  “—in Los Angeles, where Pauline stayed with her sister Jinny and her lover, the violinist and film producer Laura Archera. Laura and Jinny would later have a polyamorous relationship with Aldous Huxley.”

  “Are we on drugs right now?” Freddy asks. “Is this whole tour a hallucination?”

  “Welcome to Key West,” I say.

  “No,” Donna says, “I’m afraid I don’t know where that lamp is from.”

  “Unless I call off the wedding, she’s going to tell Will about something that happened when I was a kid.”

  “Something bad?”

  I nod.

  “Gregory met his fourth wife in the ladies’ room of a bar in Coconut Grove,” Donna says. “This was shortly after he had a single breast implant, on the left side. After the wedding, he had the implant removed.”

  “Hang on,” Freddy says to me. She raises her hand. “Sorry, Donna? I’m going to have to ask you to stop.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re making this up,” Freddy says. “You must be.”

  Donna folds her arms and gives Freddy a look like, Google it, bitch. Freddy whips out her phone. So do a couple of other people.

  “Well?” someone asks.

  “It’s true,” Freddy murmurs, scrolling. “Every word.”

  “Where do you see that?” a man asks, staring at his phone.

  “Try ‘Gregory Hemingway boobs,’” Freddy tells him.

  He types. His eyes widen. “Holy crap.”

  Freddy puts her phone away and smiles at our guide. “Apologies, Donna. Please proceed.”

  Eventually, Freddy and I drift away from the tour and head outside. We wander over to the carriage house and take the steps to the second floor to see Hemingway’s study. We stroll through the gardens. Freddy is patient, waiting for me to start talking.

  The swimming pool is sparkling in the sunlight. A dozen elephant statues stand around the perimeter, gazing at the empty water. I step over the white plastic chain and kick off my sandals. Freddy follows me. We sit at the edge and dip our feet into the warm water.

  I turn to her. “Want to get something to eat?”

  “Stop stalling,” she says. “You’ll feel better after you tell me.”

  “It’s so hard to begin. I keep this stuff locked up.” I kick at the water. “But I feel like if I tell you, I’ll have somebody on my side. Somebody who knows everything.”

  “I’m always on your side,” she says.

  “I know, but … okay. Here goes.”

  Deep breath.

  “This probably won’t come as a big surprise, but I was a troublemaker growing up. A real screwup. Not drugs or drinking or sex, believe it or not. That was normal down here, and it didn’t interest me. Not back then. I was just … wild. Disobedient, disruptive in school, always mouthing off. A real pain in the ass.”

  “Like most kids,” Freddy says.

  “Most kids grow out of it. I only got worse. And I had a partner in crime.”

  “Teddy,” she says.

  “We were born only a few weeks apart. Our mothers were old friends from high school. After Dad left, they got really close—Teddy’s mom was raising him alone, too. She was a nurse. Mom and Mrs. Bennet used to take turns watching us when the other was working. I knew everything about him. He never had a lot to say, but I knew what he was thinking. Always.” I dab a foot into the water, making ripples.

  “And we were awful. We were well on our way to being complete delinquents before we even broke into double digits. We sprayed graffiti. Skipped school. Egged cars. Shoplifted. And we got away with it. I mean, we got caught occasionally, but we usually escaped real punishment. I could talk my way out of anything, and I had Gran to back me up. She’d rant and rave at me, and Mom would cry and ground me, but they’d get the school or the police or whoever off our backs. And Teddy was this … angelic child. He was so quiet and calm. Nobody ever believed that he could do the things he did.”

  “You sound like quite the pair.”

  “We were so bored. Don’t get me wrong—we weren’t on some perpetual crime spree. We went to the beach, and we rode our bikes. We fished and swam and all that. But this island is so tiny. And it gets old fast. Causing trouble was exciting. And we had no fear. None.”

  “Sounds
like you haven’t changed.”

  This is about the last thing in the world I need to hear right now. “Please don’t say that!”

  “Okay, okay,” Freddy says. “Sorry. Keep going.”

  So I do. I tell her how Teddy and I goaded each other, constantly. If I stole a bicycle, Teddy would steal a scooter. If he snuck into a strip club, I’d sneak into a massage parlor. As we got older, it got worse. We stole cars and drove them around in the middle of the night. We broke into vacation homes and made breakfast, or ordered AA literature, or repainted the walls.

  Freddy bursts out laughing. “You did not!”

  “We were crazy. When we studied the Vikings in school, we cut a sailboat loose from the docks and set it on fire. While we were on it.”

  “Wow,” she says.

  Wow is right. I take off my sunglasses and squint in the light reflecting off the water. We had so much fun. Every day was an adventure. I hate myself for enjoying these memories, because of what came after, but I can’t help it. I close my eyes and for a moment, I remember. Me and Teddy, together.

  “I don’t know the particular moment when everything changed. When my … feelings for Teddy changed. It wasn’t like a bolt of lightning or anything. There was no sudden realization that the boy I’d known all my life was actually way, way more than my best friend. But by the time I was fourteen, I couldn’t hide it from myself any longer. I was in love with him. Totally and completely. Desperately. World-endingly.”

  “As only a fourteen-year-old can be,” Freddy remarks.

  It was bad. When school let out in June that year, I went up to visit Ana for a week in DC, and then to see Dad and Jane in New York. I missed Teddy the entire time. I obsessed about what he was doing without me. Counted the days until I’d be with him again. Compared him to every other boy I saw, and found them all lacking—not as smart, not as funny, not as interesting. He wasn’t a cute kid anymore—he was beautiful. His sea-grey eyes. His crooked smile. His sly wit. And he had such physical grace. Such presence, even at fourteen.

  “I don’t know what I expected to happen when I got back,” I tell Freddy. “Maybe that he’d see me again, and a lightbulb would go off. But it didn’t. I came home and nothing changed.”

  In no time I was a walking cliché—the personification of lovesick teenage angst. I was anxious. I was awkward. I said all manner of stupid shit. I burst into tears at no prompting. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat.

  And Teddy didn’t notice a damn thing. I was so desperate for his attention—the right kind of attention. I finally gave in to my mother’s pleas and got a decent haircut. Teddy mocked it. One day I wore a skirt. He couldn’t stop laughing.

  How could he not see what was happening? How could he not feel it too? I was so tortured. It had to change. I had to make Teddy love me. All I needed was a weapon.

  “His name,” I tell Freddy, “was Lee.”

  He was from Jacksonville. His family had moved next door to Teddy while I was gone. Lee was our age, but nothing like us. He was sweet and well mannered. A little shy. He loved to fish. He had a gap between his front teeth and a big, honking laugh. He was always smiling. It didn’t seem quite genuine—you got the sense that he was hiding something, presenting a carefully composed face to the world. Although maybe that’s hindsight.

  I was tired of being invisible to Teddy. I decided to make myself visible to Lee—very, very visible—and maybe Teddy would finally see what he was missing.

  So I complimented Lee. Touched him. I copied the things I’d seen my father do—the way he looked at Jane, the way he flirted. I smiled at Lee and listened to him and laughed at his jokes. Always, and only, in the presence of Teddy.

  Stupid, thoughtless, typical teenage bullshit.

  And it worked.

  Lee began responding almost immediately. He got nervous whenever I was around. Brought me presents. Made me a mix CD of awful country music. Invited me over for dinner with his weird, humorless parents. I managed to keep him on the hook while giving him nothing in return. I wouldn’t even hold his hand. But I kept smiling and laughing and flirting.

  In my mind, everything I did was okay because I was in love. It never once occurred to me to feel bad for using Lee.

  Not that it mattered. My phony infatuation was having no effect. Teddy didn’t seem to notice, or care. This only made me redouble my efforts, which made Lee fall that much harder.

  Love made me a total asshole.

  “You were fourteen,” Freddy says. “All fourteen-year-olds are assholes.”

  “Let me finish, and then you can decide whether that excuses my behavior.”

  Lee was now part of our little gang, but he didn’t get the thrill we got from being bad. His family was pretty religious, so he had these scruples. And he was afraid of his parents. He became our voice of reason, talking us out of the worst stuff. Most of the time. Not always.

  In early August, I walked into Teddy’s house to find him and Lee sprawled on the living room sofa, playing video games.

  “Guess what?” I said.

  “You’re blocking the screen,” Teddy said.

  Lee sat up and made room for me. “What?”

  “That house my mom is renovating? Her crew found a crate of dynamite in the carriage house.”

  Teddy finally glanced up. “For real?”

  I nodded.

  He threw down his joystick. “Let’s go.”

  “She called the county already. A bomb disposal squad picked it up this morning.”

  He slouched back on the couch, defeated.

  “But not before I liberated a few sticks,” I said.

  His slow, delighted grin made my stomach flutter.

  “What would we even do with it?” Lee asked skeptically.

  “Blow shit up,” Teddy replied.

  “Duh,” I added.

  Lee looked troubled. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

  We ignored him, and he reluctantly followed along as we planned our next act of mayhem. We soon identified a target: the naval air station off Palm Avenue.

  “Hang on,” Freddy says. “A naval station?”

  “We were fourteen,” I say. “We were idiots. Lee wanted to set it off on the beach somewhere, or in the swamp, but he was overruled. And it’s not like we were planning to take out a plane. We were just going to leave it outside the gates in the middle of the night. It was more the badass principle of the thing.”

  We did some research. I became so absorbed that I pretty much dropped my whole act toward Lee. He started trying to hide his feelings. It didn’t really work.

  One Sunday morning, Teddy and I began assembling the bomb at a rickety card table in his garage. The only light came from a couple of windows high up on one wall. It was outrageously hot and stuffy in there, but we had to keep the door closed to avoid attracting attention.

  Teddy held up an old alarm clock I’d found in our attic. “Do we really need this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s cooler that way,” I said. “Obviously.”

  “It’s stupid,” he muttered, but I ignored him. I was puzzling over the instructions I’d printed off the Internet at Gran’s office.

  “Where’s Lee?” Teddy asked.

  “Church, I guess. His dad makes him go.”

  “God,” Teddy muttered. “Just kill me.”

  “Seriously.”

  He started poking through the jumble of screwdrivers in his toolbox. I was stymied by the directions about wiring the clock to the explosives. I remember thinking that it was too bad I couldn’t ask my mom for help—she’d figure this out in no time.

  In a voice I didn’t quite recognize, Teddy asked:

  “So are you and Lee like boyfriend and girlfriend now?”

  My mouth was instantly dry. I kept my eyes fixed to the piece of paper in front of me.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Do you like him?”

  I pretended
to search for something on the table. “Sure. Lee’s great.”

  “Yeah,” Teddy said, with withering contempt. “He’s great.”

  I said nothing.

  “He likes you,” Teddy said accusingly. “He’s always talking about you. Lily’s so this, Lily’s so that. It’s annoying.”

  I swallowed my anger with difficulty. “I guess he sees things you don’t see.”

  “Yeah,” he snorted. “Because they aren’t there.”

  I finally threw down the instructions. “What’s your problem, Theodore?”

  “Don’t,” he warned me. He hated it when I called him by his full name.

  “Then stop acting like a jerk.”

  “You’re acting like a jerk!” Teddy said. “The way you are around him makes me sick! It’s all,” he tossed his hair and adopted a girlish falsetto, “Oh, Lee, you’re so funny! Ha ha ha! You’re so smart!”

  “What do you care?”

  “Because you don’t act that way with me!” he shouted.

  The garage was silent. Outside I heard a truck rumble down the street, a lawnmower buzzing in the distance.

  Teddy’s eyes were full of hurt. They told me everything I needed to know. Everything I’d been dying to know all summer.

  “I tried,” I said at last. “I tried to be that way with you.”

  Teddy shook his head. “Not really.”

  “I tried,” I insisted. “You laughed at me.”

  “Try again,” he said softly. “I won’t laugh.”

  I could only stare at him. Was he joking? Was this really happening—the thing I’d wanted so badly, for so long?

  It was. Teddy put his hands on my shoulders, leaned in and kissed me.

  It was the first kiss for both of us.

  It was awful.

  Freddy laughs. “Awful?”

  “We didn’t know what we were doing! His mouth was open, while mine was closed. Then I opened mine just as he clamped his shut. My lips were too dry. His were too wet. Our teeth clacked together.” I shrug and kick at the water. “It was all very awkward and sloppy and weird.”

  Also?

  Magical.

  We finally broke apart. We looked at each other. And we both started to laugh.

  We left the garage and went into his house, where we spent the next three hours on the sofa learning how to kiss. By the time we heard his mom stirring upstairs, getting ready for work, we were experts. Professionals. Future gold medalists.