Twice Shy

by Sarah Hogle

  Chapter 14

  WESLEY AND I START talking about where we hope we’ll be a year from now (the lady will be presiding over party games in the billiard room with a full house of guests; the gentleman will be avoiding aforementioned party games and guests, exercising a horse he rescued from negligent owners), getting so lost in the discussion that we get physically lost, too. It takes us longer than anticipated to find the fourth treasure: a dollar-store gramophone music box whose horn is camouflaged by the surrounding moonflowers, which plays the first few notes of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” before sputtering out.

  A bridge we were supposed to cross to reach the fifth and final X is too crumbled to trust, so we lose an hour figuring out an alternate course. Dinner is a feast for champions: premade Mediterranean salads in mason jars, tomato and cheese sandwiches, and blueberry bars that have gotten so gooey that we have to wash our hands in a stream afterward.

  “Nearly there,” Wesley reports, adjusting his pack. It’s cooling off, sky deepening to ocean blue with a dusting of red over the tree line. I spot the first star, which turns out to be an airplane. By the time I tear my eyes away from Wesley’s grin, three real stars have appeared.

  “Shoot.” The metal detector, which I’ve wedged into the center of my rolled-up sleeping bag, falls out. We’re up to our knees in a wide-open field of Indian grass, and the metal detector vanishes the moment it tumbles out. “Hang on.”

  Golden stalks ripple as Wesley twists at the waist to look me over. “What’s wrong?”

  “Dropped the metal detector.”

  He gets out his phone, tapping it a couple times to wake up the white-blue light. I do the same, but before I can drop down to select the flashlight my screen changes and my finger lands on a different button instead. “What the . . .”

  Gemma Peterson is waving at me.

  I’ve accepted a video call.

  “Oh my god, you answered!” she exclaims. “Where are you? Are you outside?”

  Wesley swings a confused glance toward my phone. “What’s that?”

  “Maybell,” Gemma gasps. “I have a TON of stuff to catch you up on, oh my god oh my god oh my god. Where’ve you been? How are you? It’s been forever!” She doesn’t leave room for me to answer. “You won’t believe it when you hear about—” Her eyes grow enormous, jaw hitting the floor. “Holy shit. You actually went and found him?”

  “What—I—”

  Wesley’s behind me, he and Gemma staring at each other over my shoulder. Gemma bounces up and down, squealing at a sonic pitch. “Holy shit! Holy shiiiiiiit! Did I actually connect you two? Did I make this happen?”

  Wesley’s face wrinkles in confusion. “What’s she talking about?” he asks me.

  My throat closes up. I can’t breathe, can’t think. My face is a furnace, so I know it’s turned red and I know it’s obvious. Adrenaline surges while my limbs weaken. Have to get out of here.

  “You’re the picture!” she cries. “You’re the picture I used for Jack! This is just too much.”

  He moves closer, eyes sharpening. “My picture?”

  I need to say something, but I dropped my voice in the grass and can’t find it. It’s gone. This is it. My worst fear realizing itself out of nowhere, no warning.

  “The picture I showed Maybell! When I was sending emails from the boyfriend I made up for her, which I was actually talking about with this guy I’m seeing earlier today, because good lord, wasn’t that a missed opportunity if you think about it? If I’d called Nev and Max from the Catfish show, we could have gotten on TV. And they probably would’ve paid us. But it looks like you went investigating on your own.”

  My pulse accelerates to a dangerous speed, face hot, ears on fire. I try to regulate my breathing but I’m broken, a vast panic of white, wordless alarm, and I’m paralyzed. Even with my mouth open, I draw in too little oxygen and the world begins to fuzz and fray at the edges.

  Something wrong is happening to my body.

  “Wait,” Wesley says.

  She steamrolls right over him. “I still feel terrible about that, but if you—like, are you dating now? ’Cause if you are, it was kinda worth it I guess.” Her nose is an inch from her screen, trying to see. “It’s getting hard to see you. Can you turn a light on or something?”

  It’s getting hard to see her, too; I’ve got tunnel vision and Gemma’s a brushstroke of blurring colors. My chest is cold, a solid block of ice, even as unbearable heat radiates from my cheeks. I try to pin my focus on something—Look normal, look normal—but my mind blanks. I can’t focus because I’m panicking. I’m focusing on panicking. It makes the panicking worse.

  “Maybell?” It’s Wesley, moving closer. I feel his presence at my back, towering over me, and yet I’m not here at all. I’m drifting and loose, sky expanding until it’s wider than reality, bending the earth beneath me into a ninety-degree curve.

  “Um. Um.” I pick up syllables here and there, struggling to piece them together. “Hold on.” I hand him my phone, tuning out Gemma’s loud chattering. I don’t know why I hand him my phone. Got to get out of here.

  I am walking away, to anywhere, it doesn’t matter. One foot in front of the other, breathing shaky, this unsteady new life I’ve been slowly building shattered. I can’t tell if I’m walking slowly or if I’m running, because I can’t feel my legs and I’m spinning outside of my body, up and away into the sky. My legs are too wobbly for the task of carrying me, so I sit down and work on putting my soul back inside my body. Come on, come down from there, get back in here.

  I’m a bog body now. They’ll find me in a thousand years and someone will look down at my shriveled remains and say, “Maybe she was somebody important.” The name and personality they cultivate for me will be my immortal contribution to this world.

  I close my eyes, focusing on my breathing. It’s just me and the wildflowers and the wind, and if I am very, very careful about my movements, I might not be flung into outer space.

  The wildflowers around me stir and sigh. The wind says,

  Maybell?

  Says,

  Are you all right?

  Just once, I wish the universe would give me something nice without throwing in unwelcome side effects. Wesley just started opening up to me. He’s being caring instead of broody, talking and listening. A friend. Now that he knows my secret, he’s going to slam a door on whatever this friendship might have elevated to, shifting back into the taciturn man I met at the beginning of April. He isn’t going to want anything to do with me. I’ve blown it.

  And before you answer, it continues, just know that you don’t have to say yes.

  I tilt my head back to see that the wind is moving closer. It has such gentleness for its size, soft as down, still waters running deeper than you’d think. It hides in trees to be alone and yet prolongs treasure hunts so as not to be alone. It gave its bedroom to a stranger and lets her wear its pendant, doodling her make-believe café with a few inaccuracies that have since grown to be canon.

  “Hey.” He lowers to the ground, curving over my sprawled form. Haloed by the stars. “You going somewhere without me, Parrish?”

  I watch him, heart ticking pitifully, the white, fizzling buzz settling as I come back to myself in increments. “I don’t know.”

  He lies down beside me. “Have I ever told you about why I want an animal sanctuary?”

  He hasn’t.

  Now I’m wondering why I haven’t asked.

  Wesley tells me a story about his preteen self, about his slew of brothers and parents, an apple-pie family on a farm. He says that even in a picture-perfect family like his, where the parents did everything right, he still didn’t feel like he belonged. He tells me he butted heads with them about his “vegetarian phase,” which “wasn’t realistic for farm life.” They raised cows, and the first calf he helped deliver was one he named Ruby when he was s
even years old. He got attached to Ruby, raising her himself, feeding her colostrum out of a bottle. She had to join the dairy herd when she was two, but she loved Wesley and came to him when called, like a dog. He was her human.

  When he was twelve, his parents told him it was time for Ruby to leave. She wasn’t producing as much milk anymore, so they wanted to cull her. He loved Ruby to bits and pieces; she was his cow. He cried hard, begging them to let him keep her, so upset that he got a nosebleed. His mom gave in and said he could keep Ruby. But then a week later, Ruby was gone.

  “I kind of lost it,” he tells me, “but Mom explained that they’d found a better home for Ruby on a farm upstate.”

  I wince.

  “Yeah. She felt bad, but farming is a business and dairy cows that don’t produce milk are money pits. Anyway, I found out later what ‘a farm upstate’ really meant, and . . . now I want to be that farm upstate.”

  My heart has been torn out of my chest.

  “Wesley,” I say calmly. It requires all of my restraint not to wrap him in a bear hug, even though enough time has passed since this happened to him that he can speak on it unemotionally.

  “Yes?”

  “I am going to get you a thousand elderly roosters. I’m going to raid farms and steal their Rubys.” I spread my arms. “All of this will be cows.”

  Wesley bursts out laughing. “That might be the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me?” He returns my phone. “I take it you’re feeling better. I told your friend you’d call her back tomorrow.”

  That’s not happening. “Thanks. She isn’t my friend, though.”

  I sense he wants to ask questions but is too polite to. “No more running off, okay? There’s no escaping me anyway.”

  “Sorry.” A new kind of embarrassment is creeping in. Fantastic. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “I do.” He sits up, studying me closely. “I think you had a panic attack.”

  A panic attack. I blink. Wow. “Is that what that was? I’ve never had one before. I don’t think I like them.”

  The corner of his mouth hitches somewhat. “I get panic attacks all the time.”

  “Really? I’ve never seen you have one.”

  “Oh, you definitely have. Some are invisible. Some, I try to mask by . . .” He throws his head back, thinking. “By being argumentative, I guess you’d say. One of the reasons I’ve liked passing notes back and forth is because it’s easier to say what I mean to say without defaulting to arguing. Because of nerves.”

  “You’re grouchy to hide panic attacks and nerves?”

  “Don’t give me too much credit. Sometimes I’m grouchy because I’m part cactus.” His eyes are warm. “You handled it really well.”

  I’d laugh if I had the energy. “Liar.”

  The other corner of his mouth joins in, a full smile taking shape. He reaches slowly, looking a little nervous, to brush the hair out of my eyes. Then he leaves his palm on my forehead. I close my eyes again, shuddering an exhale. “That’s nice.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s like a weight, so that I don’t fall into the sky.”

  “We can’t be having that. The hand stays.”

  I smile. Just a tiny bit. When I steal a peek at last, all of Wesley’s amusement is gone, worry clear in his eyes.

  Listening to him talk in his low, rhythmic tenor has calmed me. “Thank you,” I say. “I feel normal again. Or almost normal.” I’ll never take almost-normal for granted again. I’m exhausted.

  “Now I’m going to ask you something difficult,” he ventures.

  I brace myself.

  “I would like for you to tell me about Jack.”

  My focus strays past him to the Little Dipper. “All right. I can maybe do that.” But only because he shared first. Only because to look at him now, I can’t imagine him responding with unkindness.

  So I tell Wesley about Gemma, and Caleb, and Jack. Who, interestingly enough, I haven’t given a second thought to in what feels like ages. And whom I’d regarded as the ideal boyfriend even though in retrospect it was a laughably superficial connection. If he’d been real, we wouldn’t have been a good match. “I liked the idea of a spontaneous, world-traveling, loud, social-butterfly boyfriend,” I admit, blushing, “but in reality I think I’m better suited to . . .”

  “Yeah?” Wesley prompts. His voice is strange, like he’s borrowed somebody else’s.

  “I think someone a little more serious, a little more grounded,” I make myself finish, “to balance me out. Someone understanding. Dependable.”

  He’s quiet for a spell. And then:

  “Hm.”

  “Hm,” I agree, painfully aware of, well, everything. The grass flattened beneath me, the cool air whispering against my cheek, the smattering of stars in a vast, velvet sky. The warm body beside mine, with a big, ballooning thought bubble I want to pop with a pin to see which words fall out.

  “I still don’t understand why,” he says out of nowhere, puzzled. “I mean, you told me why she did it, but it still doesn’t make sense. Even if she had the best of intentions, who treats people this way? She could have just told you she had feelings for Caleb, and knowing you, I’m sure you would have reassured her she had nothing to worry about.”

  “I think it’s because a guy she once dated came into the hotel and hit on me. I wasn’t interested, but I guess she didn’t fully trust me after that. The most frustrating part, though, is that during all that time she was distracting me with Jack, she never even asked out Caleb! She got over him pretty quickly, so it seems so pointless in hindsight. All that energy, and for what? Gemma picked the most drastic option for plan A. I think she likes the drama.”

  “Maybe it’s a good thing we can’t understand the type of person who’d act like that,” he says darkly. “I’m glad you’re going to have a hotel of your own and don’t need to be around that parasite and her father anymore. You know that saying about success being the best revenge? With your work experience, Falling Stars is bound to be successful.”

  Oh, boy.

  It’s coming out.

  I can’t keep it in. “I have another confession.”

  He listens, not interrupting.

  “I’m not a real event coordinator.” I clap my hands over my face. “I was a housekeeper. They gave me the promotion so that I’d sweep what Gemma did under the rug and not raise any complaints to corporate, but I never got the go-ahead on any of the events I planned. None of the activities I pitched were accepted.”

  “Hm,” he says again. “Well . . . a history of housekeeping is just as handy as event-coordinating experience, when you think about it. You’ll know better than most how to clean everything that needs cleaning, keeping every room looking nice. That’s important. On top of that, you have all these ideas for how guests can have fun during their stay. Having lofty goals and something to prove is a combination that’ll get results.”

  I can’t believe he isn’t mad. “I lied, though.”

  “I lied about the cabin being a two-bedroom,” he points out. “I didn’t tell you right away that the jewelry was fake.”

  “Those are nice lies.” I should stop pushing, but I can’t stop. It’s incredible: messing up and not having the other person automatically go away, leaving me for dead. “My lie was self-serving.”

  “But you were right,” he argues. “Falling Stars would make a great hotel.”

  “Maybe the only reason I wanted a hotel is because my subconscious internalized that postcard long ago.”

  “Maybe you saw the soul of Falling Stars and knew what it wanted to be, even before you found that old newspaper.”

  Stress makes me theatrical. I fling an arm across my face, resolved never to get up again. “Stop being nice, I can’t handle it. Take the whole thing for your animal sanctuary,” I declare. “Even the ballroom. We’ll
put pigs in it.”

  He grabs my arm. Pulls me up. “C’mon, drama queen. There’s treasure out there for us.”

  “Aren’t you weirded out?” I can’t help asking. “I mean, I thought I dated your picture.”

  “Weirded out?” He releases a long-suffering sigh. “How do I say this?” He tips his head back, searching the dark sky for answers. “How do I say this.”

  I slide him a questioning look.

  A hand hovering at the small of my back makes direct contact, urging me forward. “You have nothing to be embarrassed about. Absolutely nothing. I’m deeply, terribly flattered that you would have swiped right on me.” Turbulent eyes cut to mine, then into the grass. “Makes me wish I’d had a real Tinder profile that day.”

  * * *

  • • • • • • •

  “WONDER WHERE THE TREASURE could possibly be,” I say wryly as we approach the mailbox erected on a post in the middle of nowhere. Its red flag is up, parcel ready for collection.

  He gestures for me to do the honors. I’m inexplicably nervous as I open it, revealing spiderwebs and a brown waxed-paper envelope.

  “Are you going to take it?” Wesley asks when I hesitate.

  I pull it out; it’s light, containing a sheet of paper at the most. There’s a saddening finality to this—I’ll open the envelope and then . . . it’s all over. These one-sided interactions with Uncle Victor that Violet should have experienced instead, and this mutual adventure Wesley and I are on. I’m not ready for it to be over.

  “Can we wait until tomorrow to open it?”

  “Sure.” Wesley doesn’t press with questions. He simply clamps his flashlight between his teeth and unzips my bag to tuck this treasure among the others.

  Then he hits me with the question that makes my stomach drop. “Ready to set up camp?”

  The long answer to this is an internal shriek that lasts approximately ten minutes. The short answer is a deceptively (I hope) casual “Yep.”