Who Do You Love(72)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

“Don’t be scared,” Andy told me. “I can stay on the phone with you until you get somewhere safe. Just keep breathing. Keep walking. I’m right here.”

“They’re telling us to go to the Williamsburg Bridge,” I repeated.

“Where are you now?”

I checked the street signs. “We’re going east on Eighth Street.”

He covered the phone and I heard him ask someone a question. Then he was back. “Two miles and you’re on the bridge. You can do that.”

“I’ve never walked two miles in my entire life.”

“Not true. Remember our picnics by Lake Carlisle?” That was the lake back at Beaumont. We’d had lots of picnics there, lazy Saturday afternoons where either I’d rest my head on his chest or he’d put his feet in my lap and we would talk about our classes and our parents and the dreams we’d had the night before. “We walked around the lake and that was a two-mile loop. You’re going to be fine. You can do this. I know you can.”

I looked toward the plume of smoke, rising into the air, obscuring the beautiful blue sky.

“Talk to me,” I said in a hoarse voice that hardly sounded like my own. “Tell me where you are.”

He did. As I made my way down the FDR Drive and, eventually, all the way over the bridge, Andy told me that he’d graduated from college but was still living in Oregon, that he’d been recruited into a training program that housed and fed athletes, gave them coaching and plane tickets and shoes and clothes and got them ready for the Olympics. I walked along with people just as shocked as I was, some covered in soot, some of them crying. Sometimes I’d listen to Andy, and other times I’d catch bits of conversations—a girl whose fiancé worked for a trading company with offices in the North Tower, a mother whose kids were home with their grandmother, probably watching on TV, worrying about her, and she couldn’t reach them on the phone.

“What did you have for breakfast?” I asked Andy, and he told me about the pancakes he’d made with protein powder, how his roommate, Mitch, thought that they tasted like feet but ate them anyhow because he hated to cook.

“How about you?” he asked, and I told him about the bagel and coffee cart on the corner, how different New York City was from anyplace else I’d ever lived, how Philadelphia had made me want to find a city of my own. I walked, and he talked to me—about his workout that day, the case of foot fungus that had spread through the team, his coach and how he was different from his college coaches, and Mr. Sills, who’d come all the way to Oregon for Andy’s final college meet.

I was almost over the bridge, my phone’s battery beeping, signaling its imminent death, when Andy asked, “How is your heart?”

You broke it, I thought about telling him. “Fine,” I said instead. “It’s been fine.”

“You should come here,” Andy said.

I switched the phone to my other ear. I was in Brooklyn now, with no sense of how to find Amy’s place, or of what I’d do when I got there. People filled the streets, but there were no cars, no music, no honking horns, no crying babies. It was as if real life had been canceled for the day. I felt the way I once had lying on the operating table: the narrowness of the bed, the chill of the room, the terror I felt every time they put the mask over my face and made me start counting backward, and the certainty that the lights overhead, the mask, the doctors, were all the last things I’d ever see.

“Rachel?” The phone was beeping ever more loudly . . . and Andy was still there.

“Oregon?” I said. “Why?”

“Because it’s safe.”

“Safe,” I repeated. Safe sounded good to me.

Andy paused then, but not for long. “And because I love you.”

Andy

2001

It had been more than five years since he’d seen Rachel; almost three years since he’d called her at the sorority house and one of the girls had said, “Sorry, she’s out with Kyle.” Since then his world had narrowed to include just running, eating, sleeping, then running again; a stringent cycle of train, recover, repeat; race, recover, repeat; then train some more. She’d sent him a note when she’d graduated, telling him about her plans for graduate school, wishing him well, and he’d wanted to send a note in return, telling himself that he hardly thought about her at all, but that wasn’t exactly true. What was true, Andy decided, was that he was not thinking of her with the painful, burning urgency he remembered from the nights when she was all he could think of, when he’d spend days with his roommate’s car keys in his pocket, carrying on conversations with her in his head, waiting for her to call, ready to go. He came to consider Rachel calmly and with kindness as his first love, the one who’d showed him that love was possible. He hoped that she’d be happy.