But there hadn’t been anything like that, no cruelty or fighting or petty annoyances. From the beginning, he’d been my hero, and I’d been his miracle kid, coming into his life well after he’d resolved to be a lifelong bachelor. When I was six he retired; he picked me up from school every day, took me to tennis lessons at our country club, helped me with my homework. Before I went to bed at night he’d give me an article he’d cut out from that day’s paper—usually an editorial, something about politics or foreign policy—and then in the morning, while we ate breakfast he had made, he’d pepper me with questions about it, about how I’d answer this point or that. He’d laugh at my precocious answers. He’d tell my mom, who was hardly ever paying attention: Look at us, having breakfast with one of the greatest legal minds in this country!
Dad’s in the guilt jar because I did everything wrong after he died. I barely managed to finish out the spring at USC, pulled Cs only because there’d been four weeks left in the semester and I’d done so well prior. I spent the summer in bars all over L.A., drunk and reckless, until I’d met Christopher, and after that I’d been sober, but still reckless. I was cruel to my mother—I hated her for barely shedding a tear, told her she’d always been jealous of me and Dad, that everyone knew she’d married him for his money. It wasn’t that those things were entirely untrue. She was jealous. She had married him, at least in part, for his money, or at least she hadn’t married him for better or for worse. As he got older, his hair getting thinner and his middle getting thicker, I’d sometimes catch her looking at him with a slight sneer of disgust. At the club, her affair with one of the golf pros was an open secret.
But my dad had loved her, I think, or had at least wanted to take care of her. He would’ve hated the way I treated her, how petty and small I became, how angry and stupid. He would have hated the way I fell apart. He would have been so disappointed. Sure, I’d cleaned up my act, ended it with Christopher after only a few months, a costly disentanglement that had seemed to sever any chance at reconciliation my mother and I might have had.
I’d gone back to USC, finished with honors. I’d even gotten that law degree, had moved all the way across the country just so I could go to his alma mater. I’d tried, like I’m trying now, to correct my mistakes.
But I still don’t think I’ve done right by him. Don’t think I’m the person he would’ve wanted me to be. For one thing, he wouldn’t have wanted me to be the kind of person to have enough sins to make an actual receptacle for them. He wouldn’t have wanted me to win the lottery, either—he’d come from nothing, a broken home and college on the GI Bill, a legendary work ethic that kept him doing pro bono cases even after he retired. Work, he used to say to me, is what gives our lives meaning. When I was still at the firm, when I’d come home from the office at ten o’clock at night, barely awake enough to kick off my stilettos and flop backward onto my bed, I’d sometimes just lie there, staring at the ceiling, an ache in my middle that I’d known was the particular, lingering feeling of grief. Is this what my life is supposed to mean, Dad? I’d think. Is it like this, money and contracts and arranging words in precisely the right way?
I use the tip of my index finger to push the square of paper aimlessly across the table, suddenly so lonely that I feel my eyes well up. It’s a funny thing about the campground: I haven’t felt lonely there, not really. Even in the cabin at night, when Aiden and I choreograph our strange nighttime routine—him out on that stoop until I say, me turning onto my side to face the wall when he changes for bed—I feel some thread of connection to him, a mutual awkwardness I know we’re both thinking about in that musty cabin. I should call Kit and Greer. Kit especially would get a kick out of my recounting Rachel’s math-and-science bit.
I hear the muffled ring of my phone from my pack, and I smile in spite of myself. It’s one of them—I’m sure of it. This is how it works with us, a connection that’s only grown stronger in the months since our lives changed so drastically, since that damned lucky ticket rewrote our stories for us.
But when I pull my phone from the side pocket, it’s not either of their names on the display.
It’s Aiden’s.
“Hello?” I answer, my voice tentative. I worry there’s a sound of tears in my voice, but it’s not like he’d notice. It’s not like he’d care.
“Hey.” On the phone, his voice sounds even deeper, too close to my ear. I can hear the scratch of his stubble across the phone’s speaker, as if he’s adjusting it against his face. I’ve never seen him use his cell phone—I’m not even sure he carries it with him all the time, a strange quirk these days that makes it seem as if he’s from a different time.
“How are you?” I say, because he doesn’t make another volley after his hey, and someone here has to follow adult rules of communication.
“About the same as I was fifteen minutes ago.”
“You called me,” I say, annoyed, but at least I don’t feel like crying anymore. “Don’t keep me. I have to go look at all my clothes and make sure there aren’t bloodsucking bugs making a home in them.”
I think the sound he makes is a chuckle, but I long to see it in person. He’s so stern, Aiden. Every time I get even a whisper of amusement out of him, I feel weirdly self-satisfied.
“Wanted to call and say something.” It’s so quick that some of the words run together.
“If it’s about how Hammond called Val babykins after breakfast, let’s leave it. I think one of my teeth fell out when I heard it.”
“I wanted to say I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Oh,” I manage. No chance of verbal sparring after this. My throat feels closed and tense, my eyes scratchy with unshed tears.
“Didn’t say anything before, which was a dick move. So I’m sorry. That it happened, and that I didn’t say anything.”
“It’s fine.”
Another stretch of silence, a car door slamming. I tamp down a ridiculous sense of disappointment. Of course we’re not going to talk about it. He’s just doing the right thing; Aiden’s the kind of guy who does the right thing. But he isn’t the kind of guy who wants to know more than he has to, at least when it comes to me. At Betty’s, he’d said he was trying to be better friends with Ahmed and Charlie, and I wonder what that’d be like, Aiden as a friend. I don’t suppose he’d ever be like me, too chatty by half, too loud sometimes, overeager to get a laugh. Relentless.
“It is awful how he called her that,” Aiden finally says. “Hammond, I mean. I’m pretty sure they’re insulting each other with those names.”
I feel a smile hook at the corners of my lips, a smile that felt impossible when I first walked into this room, not even a half hour ago. “They totally are.” I keep the snark in my voice, not overselling it. I’ll bet this is what Aiden’s like, as a friend, or at least for a second I let myself believe it. Quiet, but he tries. Doesn’t leave you hanging, not when it really matters.
“Well. I’d better get going. Got a shift tonight.”
“Okay.” Then I add, without thinking, “Be careful.”
A hot flush spreads up my neck, underneath my ears. I’ve said that as though he’s my fiancé for real, as though I have something to do with his life outside the weekends in Stanton Valley. I’m so embarrassed that I move the phone away from my ear to hang up.
But not before I catch him say, maybe more gently than usual, “Sure. Thanks.”
I look down at where my pack rests by my feet, see the hard shape of Aiden’s binder pressing against its back side. In my hand, my phone pings with a text, an expected one this time, in our long-running group message. Back yet? Kit’s written, and I type out a quick reply: All in one piece.
She’ll want more—she and Greer both will. Right now, though, I don’t so much feel like giving it up. I feel like having Aiden’s voice as the last in my ear. I type out another quick text to my friends, my friends who so clearly disapprove of what I’ve chosen to do with my weekends. I’ll call you guys later. Need to shower and start la
undry.
But instead I bend down, unzip my pack and slide out the binder, take it over to the dining room table, and open it again. It’s hard, looking at this and thinking about how to make it work—this story of addiction, lives lost and ruined or never really the same, even if they come out the other side—after seeing Val’s smiling, healthy girls, all that potential for them in Paul and Lorraine’s campground.
It’s hard seeing Dad’s slip lying there on the table beside the vase.
It’s hard—but it’s what I deserve.
Chapter 8
Aiden
Thursday night, and I’ve been on duty since 6:00 a.m., another seven hours to go of the double I’m cramming in before we head back up to camp tomorrow. We’re back from a call at Sunset Terrace, a nursing home that’s barely five minutes away, where we spend lots of time, easy calls, usually, since the nursing staff there has almost always taken care of the basics, and we’re just doing transport. It’s fall break at the university, a long weekend that started yesterday, so students are thin on the ground, and I’m hoping it’s a quiet night.
“Charlie, you can’t be saying that this team deserves to be ranked fourth right now,” says Ahmed, overloud. He’s stuffed himself into the old, faded recliner—a community donation, like all the furniture in the squad quarters—and is eating microwave popcorn, the bag looking a little charred on the bottom.
“It’s about strength of schedule,” says Charlie, flopping down beside me on the couch, setting her heavy black uniform boots on the coffee table. “You always overlook strength of schedule.”
“You always overlook how they barely squeak out wins,” he says, into it now. They love arguing about college football, I’ve learned, even when neither of them really cares about the teams that are playing. “They’re always—”
“You guys,” I say, turning up the volume a couple of notches. “Let’s just watch the damn game.”
“Grouchy,” says Charlie.
“I’m not grouchy.” But the way I’ve said it sure as fuck sounds grouchy.
“That camp thing going bad, man?” Ahmed says, and I can tell by the way Charlie grabs the remote from me and returns the television to a lower volume that they’ve been waiting to bring it up. We’ll get him when he’s tired, I imagine them saying. We’ll distract him first with our bickering.
“It’s going all right.”
It should be Val’s presentation that’s getting to me. All week I’d been turning it over in my mind, replaying it from start to finish, or at least replaying it from the part I’d started paying attention. Val’s presentation had what Zoe said mine needed—there was a story there—that’s how she’d made her argument. Plus she’d used her kids as props, which even I can admit was effective. I’m not creative enough to think of something like that for my own presentation, and bringing in recovered addicts seems like a risky game. There was no darkness in what she’d said. She’d made it entirely hopeful, entirely upbeat.
But that’s not really what’s getting to me. Zoe is getting to me, that hitch in her voice when I’d called her on Sunday. That vacancy in her eyes when I’d asked her if what she’d told me about her father was true. I’d fucked that up—I knew it as soon as I’d said it. We’d gotten into a good rhythm, last weekend. Started making it look real.
“Aiden, come on,” Charlie says, stretching out that last syllable. “Give us something, will you?” She’s curious, sure, but she’s pissed, too—the frustration of her continued efforts to get to know me better, to make some kind of real friendship between the three of us.
I clear my throat, push my back farther into the cushions until I can feel the hard frame of the sofa across my shoulder blades. “It’s—she’s different than what I expected,” I say, mentally kicking myself for not taking it in another direction. Why didn’t I talk about my competitors? Hell, why didn’t I tell them about my doubts about my presentation?
“She fucked you right up on that dartboard,” says Ahmed. “That was unexpected.”
I press my lips together, remembering how she’d lined up. How one of her eyes would narrow a fraction before she’d throw.
“Oh, shit,” says Charlie, lifting a boot from the coffee table so she can nudge my shin with it. “You like her.”
“Jesus, Charlie,” I say. “I’m not fifteen fucking years old. We’re doing a job together.”
“What’s that got to do with it? I met Autumn on the job.” Autumn is Charlie’s wife, the med student up in D.C. who started out as an EMT. From the scraps I overheard when I first joined this squad, it was pretty much love at first sight for the two of them. Autumn quit to go to another crew two days after Charlie was hired, knowing there’d be too much conflict if they worked together.
I open my mouth to reply, to say something about how it’s different with me and Zoe, but something about the way Charlie has settled back into her seat and crossed her arms over her chest stops me. I look over at Ahmed, who’s shaking his head in what looks like annoyance, digging his fist in the bag for more popcorn. Under his breath he mutters something—I catch a huffy call her in the mix.
Right now is my cue to get up and think of some chore to do—scrub the bay floor, check the maintenance schedule on the rig. I’d even get up and clean the bathroom if it’d get me out of this moment, because when I look back over at Charlie, I think her chin might be quivering a little.
Fuck.
It’s pretty clear Ahmed isn’t going to say shit, and even though I’ve got my list of avoidance chores queued up, I feel stuck to this couch. For the first time in what feels like forever it doesn’t seem right to take the easy option. “All right, Charlie?” I ask.
She swipes hastily at her face, then tucks her arms even tighter toward her. “It’s fine. Autumn was supposed to come this weekend, but she’s not now. She’s got an infectious disease test on Monday.”
“That’s too bad,” I say.
“She’s always got a test, you know?”
“Yeah, sure. They say med school is like that.” Like I know anyone in med school. Basically I’m just trying not to fuck this thing up too.
“I knew it would be hard, being apart,” she says, her voice wobbly. “But we’re basically newlyweds, you know? And everything was great, and we had this whole schedule and plan for when we would see each other, and it’s—it is not working out like we’d planned, you know?”
I’ve never noticed it, this verbal tic of Charlie’s—you know?—maybe because I’ve never seen her really upset. But when I hear it now, I take it for what it is. She’s looking for someone to say, Yeah, I get it. I’m with you. I hear you.
“Charlie, I told you, you’re being too hard on her. You should give her—” begins Ahmed, and I cut him a look. Even I know Charlie’s not looking for two dumbass single dudes to tell her what to do. She’s just looking to talk.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her, and she nods in appreciation, wiping underneath her eyes again.
“When I met Autumn I thought I’d found my other half. And we barely had a full year together before she moved up there, started this whole new life. Without me.”
Something about this last thing she’s said—it startles me in a place I don’t access except by accident, a long-buried fight I’d had with Aaron my first Christmas back from Wisconsin. Before his accident, before he’d gotten hooked on pills—but already he was different, hanging around with a crowd of Ultimate Frisbee guys and seemingly uninterested in his classes. By my third day home I’d only seen him twice, had jokingly bitched at him about it when he came home for dinner. “You forget about your big brother?” I’d said, nudging him playfully, like I did with guys on my team. I was younger, technically, by seven and a half minutes, but he’d never once been bigger, and before he’d always laughed at my teasing about it. “Fuck off, Aiden,” he’d said. “You do everything without me.”
“That’s rough,” I tell Charlie. “Trying to find a place for yourself in someone’s new situation. I’v
e been there.”
She rolls her head toward me, her eyes wet, but I see the surprise in them. It’s not so much for what I’ve said, but for the fact I’ve said anything at all. Anything that’s not I’d better go do inventory or Maybe we should get some shut-eye. “You have?”
I shrug, overly casual. “Not with a woman. But growing apart from people I was close to.”
“Yeah,” she says. “It sucks.” But she’s stopped crying, and when Ahmed suggests that she think about going up to D.C. this weekend, keeping it low key, no expectations, Charlie’s more receptive. Barely a half hour later and Ahmed and Charlie are both asleep where they sit, Ahmed clinging to the popcorn bag like it’s a favorite childhood blanket, Charlie snoring softly with her phone in her lap. I’m staring at the TV, unseeing, feeling all right about how that conversation went but still stuck in the shit of the memories it’d brought up.
Two months after Aaron died, when I was still half-blind with rage and grief, working any shift I could get even when it broke the scheduling rules, my crew picked up a recent knee-down double amputee who’d called 911 screaming in pain, so out of her mind with it the dispatcher could barely hear her. We’d found her in bad shape, infected sores on her both her stumps. But all she’d said, over and over, was Please, my feet, my feet hurt so bad.
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