by Jill Cox
“What’d he say?” She asked after he stomped away.
“Oh, you know. Just that he hates Americans,” I lied. “Guess why?”
She thought for a second, then scrunched up her nose. “Because our teeth are too straight?”
I pointed at her like she’d won the jackpot. And suddenly we were double-high-fiving and laughing so hard that the patrons around us started to give us judgy looks.
Brooks slung her purse across her body. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Without paying? No way!”
She touched her fingers to my lips to shush me. “Go! Now! Before that loser comes back.”
She certainly was persuasive; at least, I thought so in that moment with her fingers against my lips. So I got up and stumbled up the staircase up to the ground level, narrowly avoiding a full wipeout at the top while Brooks zoomed past me out into the street.
A lot of things could have happened next. But I’m telling you this story right now because I want you to know from the horses’ mouth … er, ball-point pen … what exactly did happen.
Ten feet outside the club, in the cold, damp January night, Brooks spewed the contents of her stomach onto the rue de la Huchette. And being the loyal gentleman that I am, I employed my hidden talent and followed suit. After all, I couldn’t let my dream girl Brooksie barf in a medieval Parisian gutter all by herself.
The thing about synchronized street puking is that it tends to throw a wet blanket on any vodka-induced hormonal fires. Somehow, we staggered the half-mile back to the rue Guénégaud and up three flights of stairs to the apartment before Brooks took up residence in her bathroom for the rest of the night, and I passed out on the floor in mine.
Shanghaied
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be James Logan. He’s the same age difference from me as Ian was from you, and for an only child with no cousins, having a close family friend like James was the next best thing. I can’t even tell you how many holidays the Logans spent with us in Portland, especially since Becky’s parents lived down the street from Gigi. And even though James was older, he always found ways to befriend me, whether that meant taking me to see the latest sci-fi movie on Christmas Day or playing soccer with me in the backyard while our parents caught up over coffee.
You know those people who just love people? James is one of them. He doesn’t care who you are or where you come from. “Everyone has a story,” he used to tell me. “You find out a person’s story and you’re opening up a new portal to discover. We each have value, Pete. Sometimes we forget that, now that the world is both too big and too small at the same time.”
So after proving myself in Paris, Gigi finally conceded: I could spend the rest of the school year in Shanghai, as long as I carried my weight around the Restoration Initiative and didn’t cause James to regret his invitation.
By February, I was a temporary citizen of the second largest city in the world. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I got up before dawn to help the people lined up outside our building for laundry services. If James needed a courier, BOOM – I hopped on the Restoration Initiative’s scooter and took off without a second’s hesitation. If something in the building required attention, I YouTubed the heck out of that task and completed it myself before James even knew the problem existed.
My. Shanghai. Life. Was. Epic.
Meanwhile, in Paris, Brooks grew bored of that pâtisserie school. Turns out making marzipan piglets and multicolored macarons was the opposite of her life calling. So on a random Tuesday, with no notice whatsoever, she handed the apartment keys over to our building’s concierge. Several weeks and several vagabonding adventures later, Brooks appeared in Shanghai.
As you know, Vick Darby, Becky Logan, and my mom grew up together, so for better or worse, James and Brooks and I have been friends our whole lives, despite our age difference. Back in the day, it didn’t feel strange that Brooks just showed up out of the blue. In fact, it’s not until I’m writing you this letter that I’m asking myself the important questions. Like how’d she get a visa so fast? Why would she ever flake on Paris after my grandmother gave her free rent? Those are some pretty obvious red flags. And yet, I was clueless.
On her first night in town, we met Brooks in her upscale hotel lobby. She was decked out – red lips, stiletto heels, and a yellow sundress that was better suited for the Hollywood Walk of Fame than the Restoration Initiative.
Looking back, I can see that Brooks was one hundred percent tone deaf to everything James stood for. And yet, at dinner, all I could do was watch in horror as she hung on his every word, her hazel eyes bright as stars.
I wanted to melt away and roll out the door, right into the Yangtze River.
After we walked Brooks back to her hotel, James and I sauntered back to the Initiative along the Bund. With the Pearl Tower glittering off to our right, James glanced over at me and smiled. “You know that was all a game, right?”
“What was a game?”
“Come on, man. The heart eyes? The over-the-top giggling?” He elbowed me hard in the gut. “Brooks is into you, kid. She only flirted with me to make you jealous.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I grunted, shoving him into the railing. “That cougar’s way too old for me.”
James laughed and changed the subject, which was my goal. But that didn’t stop hope from taking root in my young heart, and for the next few days, I decided to try an experiment.
Step one: continue to volunteer for every random task at the Initiative so I could say no when Brooks wanted a local tour guide.
Step two: when Brooks mentioned taking the overnight train up to see the Great Wall, activate my aforementioned vomit-on-demand skills and well, BYE BYE BEIJING.
The following Monday, I was folding laundry when I heard a familiar voice. “Hey, Pete.”
I looked up. Instead of a sundress and stilettos, Brooks wore a Princess Leia “Rebel” t-shirt and jeans. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and for the first time I could remember, her energy was dialed down from a ten to a three.
“Hey yourself,” I replied, stacking towels into the laundry basket. “Nice t-shirt, fly girl.”
She smiled but her eyes didn’t quite meet mine. “Need some help?”
I nodded once and Brooks joined me on my side of the desk. For the next couple of hours, she copied my every move. When one dryer would go off, she’d pull out the clothes while I unloaded a washer to refill it. If a new person walked in needing help, she listened quietly as I gave my stock speech about our services – one of the only things I’d mastered in Mandarin by that point.
She was placid, Sully. Humbled.
When my shift was over, she looked up at me with those big hazel eyes and smiled. “Would you walk me back to my hotel? I mean, you know, if you’re not busy or whatever.”
I wasn’t busy… so I went. We didn’t talk much along the way, and even though the silence was deafening, I just couldn’t bring myself to fill it. When we got to the river, Brooks touched my arm, then pointed to a bench. “Mind if we sit down? Just for a couple of minutes?”
The silence followed us to the bench. Brooks never looked at me; instead, she scooted so close that I could feel her lungs rise and contract against my bicep. When she finally did speak, her voice was so soft that the sound of the river almost swallowed her words. “Did your grandparents ever tell you I came to visit you in the hospital last summer?”
My heart thumped hard in my chest. “You did? When?”
“Every day you were in the ICU.” She paused for a moment, wincing at that last word. “And every time, Margaret always let me sit with you by myself, no interruptions.”
“I hope you weren’t checking me out under the covers, Darby. Because I may be a man now, but that doesn’t mean my body is your personal property.”
Brooks huffed out a tiny laugh. I expected her to tell me to get over myself, but when her eyes met mine, her face crumpled. And to my shock, her eyes went shiny with tear
s.
“Hey.” I laid my hand over hers and squeezed. “It’s okay, Brooksie. I’m okay.”
“I know you are,” she sniffled. “But you weren’t okay then. You could have died, Pete. You could have died.”
I wrapped an arm around her, pulling her as close to me as she’d ever been before. Brooks rested her head against my chest, so I cupped my hand around the back of her head and cradled her against me. My mind raced ahead of itself, strategizing all the ways I could keep this Brooks around for a little while. Because in that moment along the banks of the Yangtze, I believed it was the start of… well, I wasn’t sure, but it definitely felt like the start of something.
You know where this story is going, don’t you, Sully? Of course you do. The next morning, James got the following text:
Change of plans, Jimmy. A friend just offered me the chance to spend summer – er, winter – working at a ski resort in Queenstown, New Zealand. Flight leaves at noon-ish. Tell Russell I’ll see him around!
Freaking. Brooks. Darby.
I’d love to tell you that was the last time I let Brooks tug at my heart strings, but you already know I spent that entire summer on New Zealand’s South Island.
I guess now you know the pathetic reason why.
You probably don’t remember this, but on your twenty-first birthday, you said: “No wonder you were so weird freshman year, Pete. If I’d known you’d been living upside down and in the wrong season, I might have cut you a little more slack that first day.”
You have no idea how badly I wanted to hug you for that small mercy. Because you and I have experienced the same dilemma: unrequited feelings for a childhood friend. Sub Brooks in for Sutton and a ditzy South African ski bum for Lindsay, and… yeah.
Same song, same verse, same whiney, wailing bridge.
They say to hate the game, not the player, but I say “they” are full of crap. In my opinion, all the players of the world can take a flying leap off the Burj Khalifa without a parachute. I spent years chasing Brooks while she scattered tiny breadcrumbs to keep me coming back for more. But on the flight home from New Zealand that August, I vowed never to fall for her shenanigans again.
Maybe now you understand why I took it personally when Sutton hurt you over and over and over again. That is, if you’re not too busy calling me a hypocrite, because UGH. When it comes to mind games, Sutton and Brooks have nothing on me.
Keep reading, please. And feel free to throw this journal in the fire whenever you finish the last page. I endorse your wise choices.
Found and Lost
I didn’t see Brooks again for a really long time. But then one day after Pops died, she dropped by unannounced to deliver cheese fries to my grandmother. Gigi was so charmed by her irreverence that they struck up the unlikeliest friendship of all time.
While you and I studied in Paris, Brooks drove my grandmother to her doctor’s appointments. And after Gigi’s funeral, it was Brooks who made the detailed inventory that Hearth required for their rental properties. For days, she and I worked together in relative silence, organizing and cleaning and moving things into yet another storage unit. Somewhere along the way, we forged an ironclad truce.
When I left Lincoln City on the day of your brother’s funeral, I definitely intended to return. I told you the truth that day – I wanted to face down the accident anniversary with you by my side, and then spend the rest of the summer figuring out how to move forward. Together.
But when I walked into Gigi’s house alone that summer night, the emptiness swallowed me whole. I stumbled up the stairs to my room, curled into a ball, and drifted off to sleep. I didn’t even lock the front door.
Thirty-six hours later on Monday morning, I opened my eyes to find Brooks standing over me. “Welcome home, loser,” she sniffed. “Lucky for you, I’ve put off my murder spree until the weather cools down. Otherwise this would have been the easiest kill of my burgeoning assassin career.”
I rolled over, facing the opposite wall. “Go away, Brooksie.”
“I’d like to, but you see, my annoying neighbor has suddenly reappeared at his house, even though he’s supposed to spend his summer out on the coast.”
I shot a glance over my shoulder. “How’d you know I was here?”
“Remember? Hearth requested that we set up that motion-activated camera on the front porch to notify my phone of any intruders, just in case their precious celebrities were in danger. Lucky me, I get to watch every firefly in Multnomah County flutter past your front door on the regular.”
I groaned. If Brooks had played back the front door footage, she knew that I’d walked through the front door with giant tears flooding my face. And as though she could read my mind, her eyes trailed from my disheveled clothes back up to my splotchy face.
“Look,” she said softly. “I’m really sorry to barge in on your privacy, but you’ve been cooped up in this house for thirty-six hours. Alone. Someone needed to check your vitals.”
It was the wrong expression – too close to ambulance-speak for my wobbly heart. The specter of my grief filled that room again with so much darkness that I couldn’t even cry. I simply curled back into a ball, like it was the only choice I had left.
“Hey.” I felt the bed dip behind me, then I felt a hand on my shoulder blade. “Hey, come on, Pete. You’re scaring the crap out of me right now. What is going on?”
I lay there for a minute or two while she rubbed her thumb along my shoulder blade. Then I let out a shuddering breath. “Meredith’s brother and his girlfriend died in a car accident Tuesday night near the Canadian border.”
“Hold on a minute… what?”
“You heard me. And the worst part is that Meredith tried to convince them to stay here – at this house. She didn’t want them driving to Canada in the middle of the night, which is perfectly sensible and wise. And instead of supporting her, do you know what I did? I told her to let them go.” Covering my face with both arms, I muffled a sob. “See what happens when you share a life with me, Brooksie? The people you love die for no good reason at all. I am a living, breathing curse.”
We sat there together in silence as she let my story settle in. I couldn’t move, Sully. I just hid under my arms, curled into myself like a child, wishing God would show mercy upon me and let me fade away, once and for all.
I couldn’t face you. I couldn’t face your family. Not ever again.
But after what felt like an hour, Brooks squeezed my shoulder. “Get up. Come on, Russell. Take a shower, change your clothes, and meet me downstairs. You need to eat some breakfast. And don’t forget to shave, okay? You look like a grizzly bear.”
For some reason, my inner schoolboy kicked in and I did as I was told. When I walked into the kitchen half an hour later, Brooks was flipping omelets. While she worked, I filled her in on every detail we’d learned so far about Ian and Kate’s accident, trying to ignore the mechanical quality of my own voice.
We ate the omelets and drank coffee together in silence, and when we were finished, we loaded the dishwasher and set it into motion. For several moments, Brooks and I stared into middle space, neither of us looking at the other. But then she stretched her hand out in my direction. “I have an idea,” she smiled. “What’s the one thing in life that makes everything else feel better?”
I froze in place. “I have a girlfriend, Brooks. I can’t –”
“I’m not talking about that, you idiot,” she interrupted, eyes narrowing. “Just follow me, and lock the front door behind you. The last thing you need right now is a break-in you could have prevented.”
Once upon a time, Gigi had crowned Brooks the Keeper of the Keys. She had full access to my car, the house, or any other item from the Beckett/Russell collection she might need access to during our absence. So as we pulled into the self-storage parking lot, I finally understood Brooks’ comment about making life better.
That’s right, Sully. Like your mother, Brooks Darby is a minimalist devotee.
First, we c
ordoned off the section around my three storage units as a staging area, like we were the co-hosts of some new reality show on HGTV. And while the sun blazed high in the sky, we dragged my belongings outside and then designated each of the three empty units with a new purpose: to sell, to donate, and to keep.
“You know the drill,” she said. “You’re allowed to keep anything that puts a genuine smile on your face. My job is to judge the sincerity of your smile. We have until five o’clock. And… go.”
By noon, the “donate” unit was so full that we transformed the “sell” unit into a second donation hub.
By five, the “keep” pile contained two archival boxes of my dad’s photos, two of my own, and another box holding my mom’s classroom tchotchkes and my collection of tiny gnomes.
That’s it. The end. My entire life condensed to five boxes.
While Brooks arranged the boxes inside a small shipping crate, I closed out my accounts with the manager and paid him extra to arrange the donation pick-up for me. After a quick stop at a twenty-four-hour shipping store to send my crate to the concierge of the Guénégaud apartment, Brooks drove me back to Gigi’s.
Even with my head turned away, I could feel her sidelong glance. “Having regrets?”
“Too many to name. But right now, I’m thinking about Wednesday.”
“Right. Man, July’s a really terrible month for you.” She pulled her lip between her teeth. “Has it really been four years?”
“Yeah. And I promised Meredith I’d spend that day in Lincoln City, but maybe I should drive to Palo Alto instead. Spend the rest of the week with the Logans.”
“Huh.” She tapped her fingers against the steering wheel. “When will you be back?”
“I don’t know. Whenever the idea of being in Oregon doesn’t feel like a prison sentence?”
“Mmm.” The tapping grew louder. “So basically, you’re running away again?”
I ran my fingers through my hair and turned to face her. “Look, don’t do that, okay? Don’t make this personal. My entire family is gone, Brooks. You don’t know how that feels.”
