And then Aiden tells the truth.
Here are the three strokes of luck I have that afternoon, after Aiden tells his mother, and Paul and Lorraine, and everyone else, that our engagement was just for show:
One, I have my phone with me, tucked into the back pocket of my jeans.
Two, in the chaos following, which includes Hammond coming downstairs with all three very excited, very rowdy girls, Aiden doesn’t notice right away when I slip out the lodge’s front door.
Three, Aiden doesn’t notice, but Sheree does, and she offers to drive me anywhere I want to go. She takes me to the little bakery in Coleville, the one where Aiden bought me a hot chocolate. She stays with me while I call Greer, then she insists on giving me five dollars so I can get myself something to drink while I wait. Before she goes, she asks if I want to pray with her. I say no thanks but she still hugs me goodbye, as if she hasn’t just found out about me, about the lie I’ve been telling her and everyone else from the second we all stepped on that campground. I give her the ring I’d stashed in my pocket, and she agrees to make sure Aiden gets it.
If there’s a fourth stroke of luck, it may be that I don’t cry until I’m in Greer’s car, but I like to think of that coming not from luck, but from a lot of hard-earned practice.
“You want to sit for a while?” she asks, and I shake my head.
“Just drive,” I manage, swiping at my face.
“You don’t have any things with you?”
“My fr—the woman who brought me here said she’d get my pack from Aiden.”
“Okay,” she says, and for the next ninety miles she drives, and waits. Greer is more comfortable with silence than anyone I know, and she knows I won’t talk until the tears stop.
So it’s a pretty quiet drive.
When I notice that we’ve pulled off an exit ramp toward Kit’s place, I stiffen in my seat. “Greer,” I say. “No.”
At the next red light she turns to me, her blue eyes so big and clear. “I already called her. We do these things together.”
“She knew from the beginning it was a bad idea. Self-immolation, she said.”
“She’s not going to crow over you, Zoe. She loves you.”
I swallow back a fresh wave of tears, close my eyes, and lean my head back on the seat. That we’re even having this conversation—that I’m afraid to face one of my best friends in the world—is another profound, painful reminder of the mistakes I’ve made these last couple of months, letting this thing with Aiden drive any kind of wedge between us. If Kit tells me she told me so, she’ll be right.
When we pull up to the curb, she’s on the front porch, her arms crossed over her chest and her brow furrowed beneath the rim of her glasses, and before Greer’s even switched off her engine, she’s down the steps and out her small gate, reaching for my door even as I’m opening it. “Are you okay?” she says, her eyes cataloging my puffy eyes, my tear-streaked face. It’s possible, I realize, that this is the first time she or Greer has seen me cry, so long as we’re not counting laugh-crying, which I’ve done a lot with these two.
They hustle me up the front steps and into the house as if I’m some damaged starlet, bailed out from a dumb, reckless mistake, hounded by the press. As soon as we cross the threshold I see Ben’s boots inside the foyer, and feel a sudden shock of embarrassment, enough to stop me dead in my tracks. It’s bad enough that Kit and Greer are going to see this.
“Maybe we should stay on the porch,” I manage.
“It’s too cold out there, hon,” says Kit, and the kindness in her voice almost breaks me again.
“Z,” says Ben, coming into the foyer. He’s got a giant bag of peanut M&M’s in his hand—my favorite—that he holds out to me. “If he hurt you, I’ll fuck him up.”
Kit rolls her eyes, but I can tells she’s a little proud too, and a lot grateful. I offer a weak smile and take the candy. Sweet, genuine Ben. I was so hard on him, back when we first met, grilling him at Betty’s like he was a danger to my friend. He loves me because Kit loves me, but I think he likes me, too. He reaches out, gives me a brief hug before he slips up the steps.
It’s just the three of us then, and I breathe my first sigh of relief in hours.
“He said—you were an opportunity?” says Greer, sounding surprised.
I’ve told them the whole thing now, though it’s taken a while, because I’ve done a bit more crying and because Greer and Kit seem so rattled by it that they keep offering me things: the candy, water, alcohol, a sandwich, a blanket, and—at one particularly desperate point, I guess—a hot towel, like we’re on a first-class flight to Patheticville.
I shrug. “I was.”
“He’s an asshole,” says Kit. “He wouldn’t have made it past the first week without you.”
That doesn’t have the desired effect, probably. Probably Kit wants me to start feeling indignant, remembering all the shit I shoveled for him that first week at the campground, my bag of breakfast food and my smiling, eager friendliness with Paul and Lorraine and everyone else who’d been there. But there’s no indignation there, not yet, and probably not ever. To me, memories of that first week feel oddly tender and simple, such a contrast to the intense complexity of the last few days, and to the messy, chaotic unraveling of it all tonight.
“Maybe that would’ve been better for him, though,” I say. “If he wouldn’t have made it past the first week. If I hadn’t said yes.”
“Zoe,” says Greer, her voice firmer than usual. “Please don’t blame yourself for this too.”
Kit looks over at her, surprised that Greer’s beat her to it. “Yeah,” she says, looking back at me. “Don’t.”
I take a deep breath, flatten the bag of still-unopened M&M’s on my thigh, feeling the bumps of candy against my palm. “It’s not the right thing for him, this camp. It’s not what he really wants, not for himself.”
“This is the face I make,” Kit says, gesturing vaguely at her head, “when I am trying really hard to give a shit.”
“Kit, I know—I know what he said, and I know it wasn’t pretty.” An opportunity. I hear it echo in my head again—still true, and still painful. “But he’s so—he’s so sad. And he feels so guilty, and he’s been trying to—” I break off, meet her eyes. She’s sympathetic toward him, I know she is. But what she feels for me is always going to be bigger than any feelings she can muster toward him. “I love him,” I tell her, and I watch her eyes widen in shock. “I know it’s over, but still.”
I let that sit in the air between us, this big thing I kept from them—that I kept from myself, I know, for longer than I’m willing to admit. With sudden, painful clarity I realize how much I would’ve enjoyed telling them more—how much fun it would’ve been to tell them about the way Aiden and I had fought and laughed, the way we’d pushed each other, the way being with each other had been easy and hard, all at the same time. And now that it’s over, it feels like I won’t ever really get the chance.
They’re both quiet for a minute, the only sound in the room the crinkle of plastic from my candy-bag fidgeting, and eventually Greer stops that by taking it from me and opening it. I’m pretty sure the handful she takes is stress-eating related.
I take a deep breath, steady myself. “You know that night we bought the ticket, and we all said what we’d buy with the money?” I ask, finally.
“You said you wanted an adventure,” says Greer.
I nod, my head feeling heavy, congested with tears I still haven’t shed. “What I really thought, that night, was that I wanted to be forgiven. I wanted to feel better about the things that I’ve done. The stuff I did at my job, the stuff I did after my dad died—I don’t know. The person I’d become.” From where I sit in Kit’s armchair, I look out the front window, across the street. A porch light illuminates the neighbors’ fat dachshund digging a hole in one of the flower beds, covering its belly in dirt.
“You’re a great person,” says Greer. “You’ve always been a great person.”
“Zoe,” says Kit, “the camp does not have to be your—”
“He was the adventure,” I say. “A stupid, reckless adventure that I should’ve known better than to go on. And now—the way it’s all turned out—it’s another sin to add to the pile.”
“Don’t say that,” says Greer, and Kit and I both slide our eyes toward her. “Yeah, everything unraveled in the end, and he—he could’ve handled things better, once his mom showed up. But whatever happened—you were different, these last few weeks.”
“Different how?” I say, because I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. I guess I didn’t get enough in that lodge, Aiden’s mother looking at me like I was nothing.
Greer shifts on the couch, worried, maybe, that she’s gone down this path. “After we won, you were definitely different. You weren’t wound so tight, I guess, once you left your job. But it still seemed like you were…I don’t know. It seemed like you were trying so hard.” I suppress a wince at this, knowing just what she means. I had been trying so hard. Laughing too loud, making a joke of everything, my books about around-the-world trips, my fucking guilt jar. Trying to find something to do with myself. “But the past couple of weeks?” she says. “I’ve never seen you like that. I thought I knew your laugh, your smile. But I don’t think I really did, not until lately. So it wasn’t stupid. No matter how it turned out, it gave you something.”
There’s a long pause, while Kit and I take in what Greer’s said. It’s how it always is with Greer. It’s almost like you have to get used to her for the first time when she really commits to saying something. “What she said,” says Kit.
“You thought it was a terrible idea, from the start,” I say to Kit. “You never liked this whole thing.”
Kit takes a deep breath, adjusts her glasses. “I think I was a little jealous.”
“What?”
“You’ve always known the right things to say to us. The things that would get us out of our own heads, or that would get us to take risks. You’re our bullshit detector, our conscience. I knew you were struggling with your work, and I knew you were struggling after you quit, too. But I—I couldn’t seem to find the right thing to say or do, to get you out of it. I think maybe it bothered me that would be him, or his camp, or whatever, that managed it.”
“Oh,” I say, because I can’t say anything else, because here come the waterworks again. Not as fast or furious this time, but enough that I feel the tears track down my cheeks.
From her spot on the couch, Greer grabs my hand and tugs, hard, until I’m forced to stand and stumble over toward where she and Kit are sitting. Soon enough, I’m between them, right in the join of the couch cushions, their bodies pressed against mine, keeping me from sinking. “I’m sorry for that,” says Kit. “I’m sorry I didn’t know how to help.”
“Me too,” says Greer.
“Hey, don’t,” I tell them, reaching my hands out, setting one on Greer’s arm, one on Kit’s knee, pretzeling us all up in a way that reminds me of what I still have, what I’ll always have with these two. What I almost messed up. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask. I’m sorry I wasn’t more honest. I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you more about—I don’t know. Everything, I guess. My job, and how I felt about it. The way I felt after we won. I think I—I like being the tough one for you guys. I got used to playing that role. Maybe too much.”
“Idea,” says Kit, raising a finger in the air. “No more apologizing between us? We’re okay. And you’re going to be okay.”
I sigh out a breath of relief. No more apologizing. What a concept. “Good idea,” I say.
We’re quiet then, aside from my sniffling, a sound that I would normally find humiliating coming out of my own self, but I can’t muster any shame. I still feel so unbelievably, hugely sad. I’m still thinking, in spite of myself, about what Aiden’s doing now, about whether Sheree has given him the ring back, about how it’ll go with his mother, about what more he’s said to Paul and Lorraine. When I’d left Willis-Hanawalt all those months ago, what had surprised me most was how little I’d thought of it after, in terms of the day to day. How few things about it I’d missed.
It won’t be like that, not with this. I can feel it waiting for me like a physical presence, the missing I’m going to do. The campground, the people I met there, and Aiden.
Aiden, most of all.
But I have this, I tell myself, steeling my body for the long weeks to come, feeling the warmth and kindness of my friends next to me.
“Great idea,” says Greer. And then after a pause, she pats my hand where it rests on her arm. “And anyways, let’s be honest. It’s me that’s the tough one.”
I laugh, for the first time in what feels like forever, lift my hands to wipe the tears from my face. For once, I’m okay being weak, at least for a little while.
Chapter 18
Aiden
Having my parents back in the house is strange, disconcerting. When I’d first come back here, I’d thought it’d surely been a mistake to move in, to live in the place where we’d all been as a family. It’s a small place, all one floor, but it’d felt huge and soundless to me, and I’d find myself repeating these routines of my parents’ that I didn’t even know I’d internalized—before bed, checking all the locks in a certain order, like Pop always did. In the morning, opening the back door to let extra light into the kitchen, like Mom did.
Now that they’re both here—my dad flying up just two days after Mom and I returned from Stanton Valley, a special request, I’m guessing, in the aftermath of my fuckup—I find that they’ve remembered all those routines, taking them over for me while I move through the house, quiet and devastated, angry and defeated.
I’m not going to get the campground.
That much was clear, of course, after the presentation itself, the way Paul and Lorraine had looked back and forth between me, Zoe, and my mother. For Zoe and my mom they’d at least seemed to have sympathy. But for me? Disappointment, through and through, and I’d thought nothing could be worse until Paul had called me yesterday evening, one week since the most disastrous, humiliating revelation of my life.
“We both want you to know that it isn’t about your plan for the camp,” he’d said, his voice so much more gentle than I deserved. “And it isn’t about your not…you know. About your not having a family. We both want you to know that we’re sorry if we gave you that impression—”
I’d cut him off, barely able to stand him offering any sort of apology to me. “You didn’t,” I’d said. “This was all my doing.”
He’d told me that they’d talked it through a lot, that the campground had meant so much to them, almost their whole lives. That while they hoped I’d find a place for the Wilderness/Wellness camp, they weren’t sure if I was ready for something like this. “I bought that land when I was twenty-three years old,” Paul had said, the pride in his voice unmistakable. “I bought it for her, to give her something she would love, and we’ve loved this place like it’s something that came from us, together. It’s important to us that the next owners have a similar ethic in mind.”
I’d heard that like a bomb blast—so loud that it’d deafened me to everything the rest of the day except for my own thoughts. Wasn’t it love that had inspired me to go after the camp? My love for my lost brother, my best friend, the other half of me that I couldn’t save? I’d worked it over in my mind, again and again, but I’d kept coming back to the same thing.
I hadn’t done it for love.
I’d done it for guilt. For grief and pain and the determination that I could fix something after so many years of not being able to fix the very worst thing in my life. I’d brought Zoe in on it, and it didn’t matter what I felt for her now. What mattered was what I’d felt for her then, how I’d brought her there under false pretenses. How I’d u
sed her. Convenient, I remember telling Charlie and Ahmed. Willing. Available. After all that had changed between us, after everything she’d invested all on her own in helping me, I’d basically called her a means to an end in front of people she’d come to like and respect. It makes me sick to think of it. It had, actually, made me physically sick, that afternoon at the lodge. Once I’d realized she’d gone, I’d run out onto the porch, had seen Sheree’s car driving away, and dry-heaved in panic over the railing.
“You don’t want anything?” my mom says from across the table, where she’s been sitting for the last twenty minutes, silently working at the word jumble in the paper and occasionally looking up at me in concern. I pretend not to notice, to be interested in the front page, but I haven’t turned the page for as long as we’ve sat here, same as I haven’t touched the bowl of oatmeal she set at my elbow.
“Not hungry.”
“You’ve got a long shift ahead. You should eat.”
I wonder if Zoe’s been eating, I think, picturing her in the seat I’m in now, tidily eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while I glowered at her, every feeling I had toward her then the wrong one. I stand up, the bowl in one hand. “I’ll get something on the way in,” I lie. “You think Pop’ll want this?”
“Maybe,” she says. Pop’s outside, raking leaves, still ten times quieter than he used to be but even I can see that something’s different about him. Maybe it’s the house, getting back into the routines of his old life. “Aiden, sit down here with me for a bit.”
“I’ve got to get going.”
And I really, really do. Right now work’s the only thing holding me together, the only place I feel useful. But even work’s not easy—Ahmed and Charlie know that things have gone wrong, and the only thing I can say about that is that neither of them have bothered to say that they told me so. Instead they pick up a lot of my slack, doing all the extra, anal-retentive chores I usually take care of—inventory and fridge clean-out and equipment testing. And they tread lightly, particularly after Tuesday’s shift, when Ahmed told me that the night before, he’d run into Kit and Greer coming out of Betty’s. No sign of Zoe, he’d said, though they’d had takeout bags with them. I’d felt my chest compress under the weight of all the questions I had no fucking right to ask.
Luck of the Draw Page 25
