Her Name In The Sky Part 36

"I owe you some, too," Luke says.

"My sister loves you. Really loves you."

Luke smiles. Smiles in a way he rarely does-not like the world is bursting with hilarity, but rather like the world has given him something he never thought he deserved.

"I love her, too," he says.

They eat their oranges in silence, sitting side by side on the porch, until Luke turns to Hannah and says, "I wish I had been there for you."

"I wish I had told you what was going on," Hannah says. "I think I knew, deep down, that you would understand. That you would be able to talk to me in a way Wally and Clay couldn't. But I was afraid."

Luke nods. He picks up another orange and tosses it up and down in his palm. Then a slow grin spreads across his face.

"Well," he says, looking her in the eye, that old familiar hitch in his smile, "Orange you glad you told me now?"

She talks to Clay next. She walks up to his front door on Tuesday afternoon, her heart beating anxiously as it remembers this place.

"He's grounded," Mrs. Landry says when she answers the door. Her voice has lost its normal warmth. "Pete and I are only letting him out to do community service."

"I have some things I want to apologize for," Hannah says, begging Mrs. Landry with her eyes.

Mrs. Landry scrutinizes her with an uncomfortable expression on her face, and Hannah realizes that Mrs. Landry must now see her as someone foreign, someone unfathomable, someone unknown. But Hannah stands upright, feeling her breath in her lungs and her pulse in her chest.

"He's out back," Mrs. Landry says finally. "You can talk to him for a few minutes."

"Thank you," Hannah says, and then she turns away from the door and walks around the side of the house instead.

She finds Clay at the back of the yard, one knee in the dirt, his quarterback's hands hammering nails into the wooden fence.

"Need some help?" Hannah calls.

Clay startles. "Oh," he says, his tone uncertain. "No, I'm alright."

"Can we talk?"

Clay looks at her for an extended second. Then he drops his hammer into the dirt and walks over to her.

They sit on the swings and sc.r.a.pe their heels against the ground. Clay bounces a tennis ball up and down off the dirt, his tree-dark hair reflecting sunlight.

"I'm not sure how to start," Hannah mutters.

Clay clutches the tennis ball in his hand. "Yeah."

"And it's weird," Hannah continues, "because I've always known how to talk to you. I've always felt like I could tell you anything."

Clay's eyebrows draw together. He bounces the tennis ball into the dirt.

"I saw y'all kissing," he says.

"What?"

"At the beach. At Tyler's party. I went looking for Baker. I opened the garage door, and I saw y'all kissing."

"That was you?"

"It freaked me out," Clay says, his eyebrows still drawn close together. "Not because I thought it was bad, or wrong, or any of that s.h.i.t, but because it made sense. It made so much sense. And I didn't want it to. I didn't want her to be with you. And I didn't want to hate you."

A long beat of silence. Hannah winds her arms around her swing. She digs her sandals into the dirt and waits.

"I was an a.s.s," Clay says finally. "Wally was right. I was so blinded by wanting to be with her, and wanting everyone to love the two of us, and trying so hard not to resent you...that I messed everything up. I ruined us. I ruined our friends."

"No," Hannah says. "It's not your fault. All this stuff that happened-it's too big to be anyone's fault. Maybe there's no fault at all. Maybe it's just stuff that had to happen."

"No. I shouldn't have abandoned you. I shouldn't have said all those ugly things I said and I shouldn't have started that fight." He pauses. "I shouldn't have waited to see what Michele would do."

"There's a lot of things I shouldn't have done, either," Hannah says.

"You know the worst part? I knew she didn't want to be with me. I knew it deep down. She never seemed to want to talk to me on the phone. One time she started crying when I was driving us home from the movies-she said she was just stressed about college stuff, but I knew that wasn't it. Even when we-even when we, you know, had s.e.x, she was really distant afterwards. She wouldn't let me hold her or anything, and then we both just kinda lay there for a few minutes until she started to cry."

Hannah's chest aches. Clay raises his head to look at her.

"And the way she looked whenever someone said your name," he says. "I knew, somehow, that she wanted to be with you. That she had always wanted to be with you."

Hannah's throat thickens. She swallows and shakes the hair out of her eyes.

"She," Clay says, stopping himself when his voice shakes. He clears his throat and stares down at the tennis ball in his palm. "She was telling the truth about the e-mail. When she said she wrote it. Right?"

He's looking hard at Hannah, begging her for the truth. Hannah pulls her lips into her mouth and stares back at him, unsure of what to say.

But Clay nods, and then he pa.s.ses the tennis ball into Hannah's hand. "You're brave, Han," he says, looking meekly at her. "You're braver and stronger than I've ever been."

"No," Hannah says, turning the tennis ball over in her hand.

"I really missed you when all of this was going down. Even though I didn't want to, I did. I really missed our whole group. Even now, after all the s.h.i.t that's happened, all I want is for all of us to hang out again."

Hannah tosses the tennis ball to him. "I want that, too."

"You gonna talk to Wally?"

"I'm going to try."

"He'll listen," Clay says, tossing the ball back her way.

"Are you going to talk to him?"

Clay hangs his head. "I need to," he says. "I need to talk to him and Luke and Joanie."

They fall back into silence, each of them bouncing the tennis ball a few times before tossing it back to the other, until Clay stands and tells her that he needs to finish repairing the fence.

"Can we hang out when you're no longer grounded?" Hannah asks.

Clay ducks his head into the sun. "Yeah," he says, with the trace of a smile on his face. "I'd love that."

He hugs her for a long minute before she turns to leave. "I hope you figure everything out," he says, talking quietly into her hair. "You're one of my best friends, and even after everything, so is she, and I'd be a pretty awful guy if I didn't want my friends to be happy."

And then it's time to talk to Wally. She drives to his house on Thursday morning, knowing that his mom will be at work and his brothers will still have one more day of school, and parks in the driveway next to his old Camry. She knocks on the garage door and listens to the steady sound of his feet moving toward her.

He opens the door and blinks quickly at her, like he's not sure whether or not she's there. He wears the same flannel pajama pants he wore at the beach, but his gla.s.ses are missing from his face.

"Can we talk?" she says.

He studies her for a moment. "Yeah, of course," he says, pulling the door aside to let her in.

She sits down at the kitchen counter, and he stands across from her, his back jutting up against the sink. "Do you want some water?" he asks, his arms folded across his ribs.

She shakes her head no. "I just want to talk to you," she says.

It's hard at first. She doesn't know how to articulate so many of her feelings, doesn't know how to convince him that she thought she was living out truth. "I wasn't trying to hurt you," she says, her eyes lowered to the counter. "I thought I was doing what I was supposed to. I thought if I tried hard to be with you, then the romantic feelings would follow."

They never discuss the e-mail, but when they talk about Clay's party and Baker's fall through the fence, Wally lifts his eyes to look at her, and she knows he understands.

"I really did love you, Hannah," he says, his voice honest and bare. "I thought you were the most amazing girl in the world. I still do." He pauses and shifts sideways, then turns the sink faucet on and off, on and off, his fingers brushing through the water. Hannah waits.

"But you know," he says, his expression changing to the one she has seen him wear when he learns something new in cla.s.s, "one of the reasons I find you so amazing is that you've always seemed to know who you are. So if you're now learning more about who that is, then how can I be anything but happy for you?"

Hannah exhales. Wally shuts the faucet off and turns back around to face her.

"Can we still be friends?" Hannah asks. "Because I don't think-" she struggles against the break in her voice-"I don't think I could ever give up our friendship."

"I could never give up our friendship, either," he says, "but I need some time."

"Time?" Hannah repeats.

"Time to get over everything," he explains.

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay," he says, his voice steady. "I just-need to step back and get some clarity. Get my head on straight."

"Okay."

"We'll be friends again, Han. I promise."

She looks at him and sees the young, earnest boy she met on the first day of P.E. cla.s.s, the boy who recognized her from Geography and asked her if she wanted to be stretch partners.

"I'm holding you to that," Hannah says.

Wally smiles. "You got it."

She picks up Joanie from her last final exam that day. The temperature climbs to the high 80s, so they drive to the s...o...b..ll stand near Country Corner and order two mango-flavored cups and sit at one of the outdoor benches while the sun warms their hair. Joanie fills Hannah in on Luke's experience at running camp so far, telling her all about his new friends at Spring Hill and his plans to visit home in two weeks.

"That's awesome," Hannah says, "but let's talk about you. You're a rising senior now. You feeling okay about it?"

Joanie falters, her face showing her surprise, but then she leans her elbow on the table and adopts a deliberately casual expression, as if it doesn't mean the world to her that Hannah has asked the question. "Yeah, I'm okay," she says, swirling her spoon around her cup. "It's just one year."

"Joanie."

"Yeah."

"I'm your sister. You can tell me these things."

Joanie looks at her the same way she did when they were little and Hannah caught her in a fib. "Fine," she says. "I'm scared as h.e.l.l. I know I have other friends, I know there are some pretty cool people in my cla.s.s, but I can't imagine not having Luke there, or going to volleyball practice without Baker, or eating lunch without any of y'all." She pauses and scratches casually at her elbow. "Or driving to school without you."

"You're going to be fine," Hannah promises.

They don't look at each other as they talk through it-they sc.r.a.pe at their s...o...b..a.l.l.s instead-but afterwards, on the drive home, Hannah feels like they are 11 and 10 years old again, riding their bikes home after buying candy at the gas station.

"Han," Joanie says, "what are you gonna do now?"

"What do you mean?"

"Baker. What are you gonna do?"

The sun streams through the leaves of the live oaks as Hannah steers the car onto Olive Street. "I'm going to wait," she says. "I'm going to wait until she's ready."

"What if she's never ready?"

Hannah guides the car onto their driveway. She thinks about how she has waited for Baker all week, how she's thought about Baker's broken rib and the cuts on her hairline and the bruises on her skin. How she's kept her phone in her hand like a talisman. How she's looked out the window with the sound of every car that's driven by.

"I'll just keep waiting," she says.

May melts into June. Hannah doesn't see Wally, nor does she see Clay. She and Joanie sit on the back porch in the mid-morning heat and eat Apple Jacks and toast, and Hannah swells with hope that today might be the day she sees Baker again.

She goes to Ma.s.s with her parents. Some people look at her differently than they used to, but Hannah remembers Ms. Carpenter's words and looks up at the Crucifix without shame. When it comes time for her to receive the Eucharist, she stands confidently in front of Father Simon. He holds the Host in front of her for a lingering second, his clerical collar tight on his red neck.

She reaches up and takes the Host out of his hand. It melts onto her tongue as she walks back to her pew.

It rains every day during the first week of June. The wet heat of the morning transforms into the warm showers of the afternoon, and by early evening, it rains so hard that the streets flood. Hannah presses her fingers to the dining room window, watching the Dupuis' trash can fall over from the wind and rain.

She steps outside on Friday afternoon, her tennis shoes laced tightly on her feet, just as the first rumbles of thunder reverberate on the air. The earth is muggy and still as she jogs down the street, her body moving under the protection of the strong, st.u.r.dy trees.

Just as she turns onto Drehr, a light rain starts to fall, sprinkling her face and melting into the sidewalk. She keeps running, her wrists damp with sweat and water, the streets damp and smelling of rain and steam.

By the time she reaches Kleinert, the rain has strengthened into a regular shower, but she keeps running anyway. The rain feels good on her skin and she feels good in her skin.

She's soaking wet by the time she reaches St. Mary's. Something builds in her heart as she runs past the familiar blond brick buildings. She looks at the statue of Jesus, visible from the street, and smiles as she runs by.

On the second Sunday of June, late in the evening, when Hannah is washing the dinner dishes, there's a knock on the back door.