On the way down the highway, yellow fields spread out all around them, Jess, unable to keep up the easygoing act, finally admitted the truth. She told Clara about the drum circle in her kitchen, her damp and terrible room, the long bus rides to work, and the carbon paper. About how lonely she had been. She said those words.
“I really thought,” said Clara, not looking away from the road, “you’d barely noticed I was gone.”
“How could you think that?”
“With Lori, and your job, and the King Street clubs.” Clara didn’t sound bitter, just tired. “You made it all sound pretty sweet.”
“I don’t know,” said Jess. “I was just trying to make it all okay. I could hardly start complaining, after what you’ve been through.” There was also the preservation of her dignity. Surely a person could be permitted such a thing.
“I still would have listened,” said Clara. “I’m not so delicate. You can be real with me.”
Maybe, thought Jess. But had Clara ever truly been real in return? There was always a part of her she kept for herself, so that she remained a mystery, a puzzle, even to Jess—maybeespeciallyto Jess, who was supposed to know her better than anyone.
Jess told her, “I wasn’t sure you’d noticed I was gone either. You walked away like it was easy.”
“It wasn’t easy,” said Clara, signalling then speeding up to pass a slow-moving sedan. “Nothing’s been easy.” She pulled back into her lane. “But I just didn’t have much of a say. You really think I would have chosen moving back in with my mother?”
Jess thought about “Snow White and Rose Red,” a fairy tale that was rare in that it featured two girls, a pair of sisters who’d promised never to leave each other as long as they lived—although what happened next involved an evil gnome, a talking bear, and a double wedding to a pair of princes, so perhaps everything about it was unlikely.
She said, “Sometimes it just seems like…” She was choosing her words carefully, daring to articulate what had been on the tip of her tongue in every telephone call, deleted from every email she’d written to Clara in the last couple of months. “…you’re not planning on coming back. Not anytime soon. And it makes me wonder if you even want to.” She looked to see Clara’s expression as she considered what Jess had said. Maybe it wasn’t that Clara was a puzzle, but there were these parts of her that Jess couldn’t bear to know, all those parts that insisted on freedom.
“I guess,” Clara finally responded, “it’s just that I’ve got to keep facing forward right now. So much is going on, and my mom needs me. And here I’ve got a place to live. I’ve found a job.”
“And Jake.”
“Jake,” said Clara, “is definitely not a factor in my life choices.”
“Not yet.”
“Not ever,” said Clara. And Jess believed her. Clara could be cold. After her dad died, she never saw Ferber again.
Clara put on her signal and turned into the long driveway to her family’s house. Jess had never been here. The funeral had been just family. She’d seen photos, she’d heard stories. She knew Clara’s family from their trips to the city when her mother would drop off baking tins stocked with squares and cookies, but never stay for long.
“Here we are,” said Clara, pulling up to the house. “Ready or not.” She turned off the engine. “I’m glad you’re here. It’s been so quiet. I’m hoping you can help us fill in the space.”
And after just a few minutes, Jess understood a whole lot more about what Clara had been going through. The house was silent, their voices echoing through the empty rooms. Jess immediately started speaking in low tones, the way Clara’s mother did—when she spoke at all. She seemed so slight, but she’d taken Jess in her arms with such a crushing force.
“She’s a bit intense,” Clara explained later. “These days she’s only got two gears, and it’s either that or catatonic.”
Sound travelled through the house in a strange way, so they stayed outside a lot that week. It was easier to escape on walks down gravel roads and then the hot black highway, taking shelter on the dusty shoulder when big trucks came barrelling by. Sometimes they wandered through fields or rambled in the woods. But no matter the route, there came a point when they had to turn around and come back, too far away from anything for there to be destinations.
“I don’t know how you can stand it,” Jess said on their second trip to the pond in a single day. At least there was birdsong and breeze, sunshine. The heat felt good on their skin,and at the pond they could go swimming. They discovered something new together after all these years: they were both amphibious. This hadn’t come up when they lived in the city beside a lake that seemed so far away.
“Well, you can imagine what growing up here was like then,” said Clara as they made their way through the meadow. “And it’s not so different now. When I go out, she has to know where I’m going. She doesn’t like me being on the roads—she never did, and now…”
“But you can’t stay forever,” said Jess.
“Of course not,” said Clara, as though the statement were ridiculous. But that she was here at all was no more absurd. Then she added, “I don’t want you waiting for me.”
Jess stopped walking, confused.
Clara continued making her way down the path. “I don’t even know what I’m doing these days. And the strange thing is that I don’t think I want to know. But I don’t want to be the one that holds you back.” She turned around so Jess could catch up.
Jess was trying to work out whether Clara was giving her something now or taking it away. “But when have weeverknown what we were doing?” she asked. “It never stopped us before.” None of that mattered if they were doing it together. “And I don’t think you can take all the credit for the fact I’m going nowhere.”
“You haven’t gone anywhereyet,” Clara corrected. “And that’s not even true.” They started walking again. “Iwantto come back,” said Clara. “But my mother needs me; my sisters can’t manage it. But there’s all these other places too—maybe teaching in China? I don’t know. And I was so anxious about the end of school, about what was going to happen next. But then the world blew up, and I’m still standing. Anddon’t you think that’s kind of miraculous? Don’t you feel it too? I just don’t know where all the pieces are going to land yet. And I’m really not in a rush to find out.”
They’d arrived at the pond and Jess could hear the deep tones of the bullfrogs. Their first time here, Clara had delighted in showing her the actual frogs and even managed to catch a tiny leopard frog in her hands. She chased Jess around the perimeter of the pond as she ran away shrieking. Jess was a folklorist, not a biologist. Frogs were all about symbolism, and she’d never realized how little that meant until she was confronted with flesh-and-blood frogs, so cold and slimy. How little she’d been trained for the actual world.
