“If you take a look at page twelve of your packets,” I say now, my voice feeling a bit strained from all the talking, “you’ll see that most patients come to the Wilderness/Wellness program on physician referral.” I pause, waiting a well-rehearsed few beats for my audience to read over page twelve, half the page showing stats for the types of referrals, the other half with brief but convincing quotations from doctors in the state of Virginia who have sent patients to the other centers.
I watch as Lorraine lifts her reading glasses from where they hang around her neck, nodding as she reads. It’s hard to tell, really, what Lorraine and Paul have been thinking through this. Not much of what I’ve said here invites a lot of laughter, and for the most part, everyone’s been quiet and serious throughout. That worries me, but Zoe told me yesterday that this is what I should expect, that whether I talk about Aaron or not, no one who’s listening is going to be lighthearted when they know they’re hearing this pitch from someone who’s been personally affected. “People aren’t going to say much,” she’d said. “But that’s not really a bad thing.”
When Lorraine looks up, I begin again. We’d timed the stuff about physician referrals to this stop in particular, the infirmary, so that I can talk about the two full-time nurses that would be on staff, the medical director that would work on-site a minimum of three days a week. This is different, I tell them, from the clinical psych staff that’s kept on staff—Wilderness/Wellness tries to keep those functions separate, so that patients don’t necessarily see their treatment here as highly medicalized. I talk, too, about the major insurance companies that cover sixty-day stays, the treatment financing that’s offered through a third-party vendor for people who don’t have insurance. I dislike this part, the money stuff. It feels ugly, particularly after Aaron’s failed rehab efforts, and the money those efforts cost our family. One night, not long after my parents had received the settlement check, I’d worked out how many days I could’ve paid for Aaron at Wilderness/Wellness, if I’d only had that kind of cash.
It’d been a lot of days.
I ask for questions, same as I have at every stop, and this time Paul raises his hand. “What kind of changes would you need to make to a building like this?” he asks, gesturing to the infirmary.
“Pretty big ones here.” The infirmary’s basically a modular house, factory built, three small windows, unreliable plumbing. “We’d look to expand the space, open it up. As you can imagine, many of the patients are cautious about hospital-like spaces, so natural light is key.”
Paul nods. “Probably need better security too, huh?”
“Yeah, I—” I break off when I notice his teasing smile, his small gesture toward that lock I picked. “Oh. Right, yes.”
Beside me, where she’s been for all of this tour, Zoe breathes out a quiet laugh, and before I’ve even thought of it, I’ve reached out, set my hand on the nape of her neck, my thumb moving lightly over the soft skin there while I try not to think too hard about the memory of our first night together. Still, for a second, it feels like everything from this morning, from this whole presentation, has faded away. What would we have told Paul and Lorraine, after all, if we’d gone to them this morning, told them the truth about us? Because right now, it feels like nothing about me and her is a lie.
“Shall we go on back toward the lodge?” she says, gesturing an arm out for everyone to pass. If I’m the info guy during this thing, she’s the friendly, supportive guide. She passed out the packets, reminded people where to go next, checked her watch to keep us on schedule. We drop back while everyone moves on to the next stop, our last. “How do you think it’s going?” she asks, quietly.
“Was going to ask you the same thing.”
She smiles at me briefly, steps over a root that’s sticking up in the trail, which she knows by heart is there now. “You’re doing well. Getting lots of questions.”
“Zo,” I say, slowing my steps a bit, letting the group get that much farther ahead. “This morning—”
“Let’s just finish this,” she says, cutting me off. It’s not harsh, the way she says it. But she’s right, there’s no use getting into it now, not when we’re so close. There’ll be plenty of time after to talk about everything that’s happened between us over the last few days.
The plan is for everyone to take a seat in the outdoor classroom for this last stop, and Zoe leads the way, taking her own seat before patting the one beside her for Lorraine. Lorraine, in turn, pats Zoe’s knee when she sits, smiling at her in the kind of affection she gives out easily to her campers and friends, and Zoe’s face flushes in a kind of shy, surprised pleasure, an expression I haven’t seen on her much. Not for the first time do I let my mind try picturing her here in a more long-term way. Ever since I’d decided that I’d do the camp manager role here, I keep thinking of it. No matter how many summers I’d spent here as a kid, it’s like the adult version of me now can’t see myself at this place without her. At first I’d thought it was because I’d lost that kid version of me when Aaron died—that I couldn’t see myself here without him.
But no. That’s not it at all.
I swallow nervously, shift on my feet one last time as Hammond finally takes a place next to Val. This is the part where I give a wrap-up, where I talk about each one of the patients I mentioned along the trail and where they are now. Phillip, nineteen, in technical school for heating and cooling systems, twenty-three months clean. Brandi, twenty-two, a hairstylist, thirty-eight months clean. Kellan, twenty-seven, one of the first patients to move through the Colorado program, married and a father of one daughter, a college graduate, six years clean. I’ve got seven total I’m supposed to mention here, plus the stats on stability rates five years after completing the program. I’m supposed to talk about why programs like this are the future of drug treatment. I’m supposed to talk about the combination of cognitive behavioral therapy and wilderness therapy.
A strong close. That’s what Zoe had called it, back when I went through it with her the first time, though maybe her voice had been a bit stiff.
But for some reason, so close to the end, I stumble. I confuse Phillip with Kellan, and I get flustered enough about it that I go back over it and do it again, conscious of the slight, wincing secondhand embarrassment from my audience. I clear my throat. “Sorry,” I say, resisting the urge to wipe a sweaty palm across my jeans. “Been a long couple of days.” Before I begin again, I catch Zoe’s eye, and she raises an eyebrow, gestures up to the podium. Want me to do it? she mouths, and I give a subtle shake of my head. “So probably it’s clear,” I say to the group, “that a lot of people have had success with this.” That’s not really a part of my script, that awkward transition, but at least I get going again.
It’s not a strong close, that’s for fucking sure. It’s like all the practice has caught up with me, and the words I’m saying seem disconnected from their meaning, so that when they come out, I’m sort of observing, with one part of my brain, how strange they sound. I’m not so much looking at my audience as I am looking around them, no real eye contact, and somewhere in the back of my mind, a thought nags at me: You don’t want this to be over.
But then, finally, it is.
Zoe had told me not to expect applause, that there wasn’t some kids-in-costume flourish here, that it might feel more like a whimper than a bang. But it’s still jarring, the quiet—the way everyone’s staring down at their materials, I guess a little unsure about what questions to ask. As we’d planned, Zoe gets up and walks to the front, stands beside me. We didn’t talk about what she does next, which is to slide her fingers between mine, squeezing our palms together. Still, she sticks to her script. “Aiden and I thought it’d be a good idea to head back into the lodge now, take any questions you have in there. This is a tough subject, we know, so take a few minutes.”
We wait together for everyone to go ahead of us, following slowly behind. “I fucked up the end,” I murmur to her, only slightly embarrassed. Mostly I’m rel
ieved to have a second alone with her.
“It was fine. It felt real.” I look over at her, her chin tilted down as she walks up the lodge steps, and I squeeze her hand to get her to look at me.
“Almost there,” I tell her, and she nods, solemn. Too quiet.
Inside, we stay like that, side by side. I’m eager to get off my feet, but it feels good to be in here, away from the bite of the cold air, and within a few minutes, everyone seems to warm up a bit. Hammond goes up to check on the kids, but everyone else sticks around, and there’s praise and questions and Paul and Lorraine seem interested, maybe even a little proud. I relax by degrees with Zoe next to me, her hand in mine, and off script, I do better with the questions—I’m not so focused on how long my answers take or how they’ll affect the timing of a tour stop.
Almost there, I repeat to myself silently, even as I’m listening to Val—always obsessed with demographics—ask me about whether there’s an age limit on patients. But when I open my mouth to answer her, something catches my eye across the room, the front door of the lodge opening slowly—a weak arm, probably, up against a very heavy door.
With the light behind her, it takes me a minute to register.
But that’s her.
My mother’s here.
Chapter 17
Zoe
She’s taller than I remember.
It doesn’t make sense, of course, that it’s the first thing I think when I see Kathleen O’Leary standing there. The first thing I think should probably be something like abandon ship, but instead I stand stock still beside Aiden, my hand still in his, my skin flushing in a hot shock of surprise and shame. It’s possible—probable, even, that I murmur a quiet “Oh, no.”
Beside me, Aiden jerks in surprise, and I feel his hand heat, briefly, before he pulls it away from mine, my first indication of how wrong everything is about to go. “Fuck,” he murmurs, for my ears only, or maybe not for my ears at all, but I’ve heard it.
“Kathleen?” says Lorraine, her voice a happy question before she moves toward the door, calling, “Oh, Kathleen!”
She’s not seen me yet, or if she has, she hasn’t yet registered who I am. That much is clear, because right now she’s smiling, her arms out to Lorraine, and then to Paul, who’s also crossed the room to her, adding to Lorraine’s exclamations of surprise. It’s a meeting of old friends, I guess—maybe the O’Learys and Dillards weren’t close, but if Aaron and Aiden spent over a decade of summers here, clearly there’s a history, and I can see it in the way they embrace and then stand back from each other, cataloging what must be years of changes.
It’s not that she’s taller, I realize, still staring. It’s that she’s healthier looking. Her hair is a shiny white, her face lightly tanned, her back straighter than it was when I watched her walk from conference room four. For a ridiculous, stupid, suspended-reality moment, I look toward Aiden, open my mouth to say something like, Hey, your mom looks great, but already he, too, is moving away from me, his stride slow and his shoulders set firm. I slide my eyes to the door, wondering: Would he want me to slip out?
“That’s your future mother-in-law?” says Val, interrupting my half-baked thoughts of escape, and I suppress a wince, unsure of how to answer now. Will Mrs. O’Leary play along? Does Aiden have some way to tell her, I think, as I watch him lean down to kiss her cheek, that I’m here, that there’s something he hasn’t told her yet, but he’ll explain it all later?
But that’s not what he’s telling her. From here I can hear Mrs. O’Leary say, “Oh, he’s fine, honey,” because what Aiden must’ve have been asking her about, in this brief, critical moment, is his father, about that call from this morning, the one that had me making one last, desperate attempt to stop this. At this precise moment, it is painful, physically painful, to know that it didn’t work. If I had pushed harder—if I’d told Paul and Lorraine myself, maybe—I could’ve stopped this, what’s about to happen. Aiden would’ve been angry, of course, but it wouldn’t have turned out this way. “I wanted to be here for you today,” I hear her say. “But I guess I missed the whole thing!”
“Yeah,” I answer Val, finally, quietly, and she tsks in some commiserating annoyance. “God, it’s just the same with Hammond. He’s completely a sucker for his mother, I swear. You know she called me Valerie for an entire year? My real name is Valentine. I told her that the first time I met her.” I think I manage a smile; I think I manage to shift my eyes to her and nod, acknowledging her story. But my insides feel like the center of a tornado. Every single thing around me is spinning entirely out of control, breaking apart, and I’m a great column of whirring noise.
I feel it the second she notices me. She’s seen me, past Aiden’s shoulder, and I’ve never seen a face do what hers does then, such an abrupt transformation from happiness to—I don’t know what. It’s not anger, not sadness, not cruelty or vengeance. It’s…blank. Like I am not even worth the very worst of her emotions.
I think I might, in spite of myself, take a slight step back. “In-laws,” Val says, staying by my side in a gesture of loyalty that I find strangely comforting, no matter how fleeting it’s likely to be. “I swear, they’re just jealous.”
“Zoe, my goodness!” calls Lorraine. “Come on over here.” But it’s not even really necessary—she and Paul are already ushering Mrs. O’Leary farther in, Aiden beside her, his face full of dread and panic. We lock eyes for a brief, painful second, and I can feel it, what’s in that look. This is the end.
“Mrs. O’Leary,” I say, when she’s standing in front of me, my voice steady and clear. It’s the voice she would’ve heard come out of my mouth before, and I add a professional nod. Oddly, this feels like the thing I should do for her—it’s kinder, in some way, not to upset her expectations. Still, I can’t do old Zoe as completely as I might like, what with my thermal shirt and my messy ponytail, my dirty hiking boots, now well worn-in from weeks of walking this land alongside Aiden.
She barely looks at me, turning her eyes instead toward her son. “Aiden?” she asks, and in her furrowed brow I see the only relic of his face in her, the only way they look even a little related.
“Mom, if you could—”
“Don’t be telling me you kept her a secret from your own mother too,” says Lorraine, laughing. “When he called us and said he’d be bringing a fiancée, we could hardly—”
Mrs. O’Leary’s eyes snap back to mine, and I feel myself flush all the way to my hairline, feel my stomach drop to my feet when she shifts them down my arm, to my left hand, and her mouth purses and twists in what must be shock—though not, I hope, recognition. I can’t imagine how she’d feel if I’m wearing a ring of hers, or of a member of her family.
Aiden clears his throat. “I need to explain something,” he says, and what’s awful is that everyone’s sort of gathered around now, or at least they’ve come closer. Tom and Sheree have taken a seat at a nearby table, and I can tell they’re pretending not to watch, pretending to concentrate on Little Tommy pushing a toy train across the wood floors. Val’s not even bothering with such etiquette—she’s looking at us like something good is coming.
“You’re with this person?” Mrs. O’Leary says, and that’s all I need to know about where this is going to end. This person. I almost want to laugh at having been so reduced, so fully categorized into nothingness. Mrs. O’Leary’s voice, after all, is only the audible expression of what I’d thought about myself for so long, back when I was so stuck—that I did nothing, was nothing. “Do you know who she is?”
“Wait, who is she?” says Lorraine, and Mrs. O’Leary briefly looks to Aiden again, a pause where she must realize that there’s something here Aiden has not told anyone, some complexity that she can’t account for.
He opens his mouth to speak, but I interrupt him. “I’m an attorney who worked on the settlement case for Aaron.” Sharp, like I’m putting a knife through this whole thing, slicing myself off from everyone else in this room. It’s a bit of wishful thinki
ng, doing it this way—to hope I could be extricated so easily from the community we’ve built over the last five weeks, no matter what brought us all here.
Aiden looks over at me, his face a mask of shock. Today has been so difficult for him already. I can see, behind his eyes, how overwhelmed he is, how painful it is to see his mother, and to have to tell her this, this inevitable truth about what I’m doing here. It’s like his circuit board is overloaded.
“Is—is that how you met?” says Paul, tentative and confused, and this is fucking miserable; one of us has to end this, to let everyone in this room know the wrong we’ve done, and at least give them some clarity.
“I asked Zoe to be here with me,” Aiden says, before I can open my mouth to do it for the both of us. “She came to see me several weeks ago to—” He stops, clears his throat again, looks over at me. He doesn’t want to say what I came to see him for—to apologize—and I don’t know if he’s doing that out of kindness, out of respect for my privacy, or because he doesn’t think his mother will believe it. He begins again. “She came to see me, and I—saw an opportunity.”
He shifts as soon as he’s said it, moves his weight to a different side of his body, a physical effort to figure out how to do this, or redo it. Me, I’m still frozen, maybe even more so now, because of course what he’s said is true—I was an opportunity, guilt-ridden and willing to do whatever he’d asked of me, and, whether I realized it then or not, curious about him. Eager to know him.
But it still tears my heart right in half.
“An opportunity for what?” Mrs. O’Leary says, her first flash of anger.
“Several weeks ago?” repeats Lorraine, looking back and forth between us, and I can see what she’s trying to do. She’s trying to find a way to make it possible that Aiden and I have not lied, that we’re somehow really, truly engaged after a matter of several weeks.
Slowly, so I don’t draw attention to myself, I bring my hands together. I slide Aiden’s ring off my hand and for a few seconds I hold it tightly in my fist, feeling it press into my palm.
Luck of the Draw Page 24
