Chapter 12
Aiden
The office I set up in my parents’ house—my house, I keep having to remind myself—is in my old bedroom, the one I slept in until I left for college, the one I slept in every time I’d come home for a break. As close as we were, Aaron and I never shared a room. From almost the time we were brought home from the hospital, Aaron needed special dehumidifiers, fans, nighttime nebulizer treatments that made my mom anxious and bleary eyed. When I’d moved back here, I’d done some pretty inconvenient gymnastics to justify avoiding Aaron’s room. It’d been the most natural choice for an office—his last year, he’d had his own place, a shitty apartment on the east end, and he’d moved most of his furniture over there, even his old twin bed, which my parents had eventually donated to charity along with everything else.
But I’d been unable to face it. I keep the door closed, avoid looking at it when I pass by to get to this office. Come Christmas, I’ll have to think of a new plan; if my parents come home, I’ll need to get a bed in there so we all have a place to sleep.
I press my palms to my eyes, shake my head in an effort to clear it from distraction. My laptop’s gone to sleep again, because I’m stuck, stuck trying to tell this story about Aaron and my plans for the camp, the story that’s supposed to accompany my tour presentation. It’s four thirty in the afternoon, a time when my brain is sluggish anyway, and I’d only managed an hour of sleep after my post-shift shower. But I’ve been opening the same document since Sunday evening when I’d gotten back from Stanton Valley, and so I know I can’t blame my sluggish brain and erratic sleep schedule for the block.
I just don’t know how to tell this story.
I run the tip of my index finger across the mouse pad, see the screen come to life, bright white and mostly blank, a blinking cursor at the end of the one sentence I’ve managed to keep: My brother was more than just his addiction.
It’s more important than ever, I’ve decided, to get this right. My assertion to Zoe—I want this to work—had been echoing in my mind since I dropped her off, and sometime halfway through my sleepless night I’d made a decision. If I want it to work, the story’s just the beginning. It’s like Zoe said: I’ve got to be all in. When I’d gotten her text last night, I’d called her back, thinking: I’m going to tell her. But somewhere along the line I’d realized I want to tell her in person, when I can read her best, when her voice isn’t separate from her body.
I think I can read almost everything from Zoe’s body.
From the tinny speakers on my laptop comes a blurting ring, and I snap to attention as if I’ve been caught out by a teacher, doing homework for another class when I should be paying attention. I click the dialog box that’s popped up and wait for my mother’s face to fill the screen.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Hi, honey.” She looks good these days, or at least better than she did. At the new condo in Florida, she’s got a small garden plot out back, which she fills with pots of succulents that bloom with bright, desert-like flowers she likes to photograph. She’s got color in her cheeks, and her hair seems thicker, a brighter, cleaner white than it was when she’d left here. “How was work last night?”
“Not too bad. Only a few calls.” She looks better, is doing better, but the fact that she knows my work schedule so completely is one of the many remnants of Aaron’s addiction in her life. Growing up I’d felt lucky to be one of those kids who didn’t constantly have to check in at home, who had the trust of my parents to go where I wanted so long as I made curfew, kept up with my chores. But now, my mom asks me to email her my work schedule every week. She knows which day I usually go to the grocery. I know that at least once before, she’s called the neighbor to ask whether it seems like I’m having trouble keeping up with the property.
“You’re working too hard, this plus what you’re doing on the weekends.”
I swallow, look at my own face on the screen, rather than hers. I wonder if it has a guilty look about it. “I’m all right,” I say, trying not to sound impatient.
I catch her purse her lips, her physical effort not to press me about the camp. Not long after I’d made my plans with Zoe, I’d told my mom it’d be better if she backed off about it, that I’d fill her in when the six weeks were up, that it helped me focus not to talk about it too much. But she’s as desperate as I am to feel like that money’s doing some good out there, that we’ve managed to do more with Aaron’s settlement than shipping my parents to a place that doesn’t have any bad memories.
“Did you see the email I sent you on Monday?” she asks, her voice hopeful.
“Yeah,” I say, shifting in my chair. “It’s like I said, Mom. Those groups aren’t really my thing.”
A few months back my mom started going to group grief counseling sessions. Since then, it seems as though she’s kept her own pain in enough check to try watching over mine too. She sends me articles about addicts’ brain chemistry, about twin loss, about meetings in the area for people who are grieving.
None of it appeals.
“I’m doing good,” I add, and I realize that it’s not even entirely a lie. When I wake up in the mornings, I don’t feel so disoriented anymore. For a while there, it felt like every time I’d open my eyes, I’d have to provide myself with a recap in order to prepare myself for the shock of another day in this life. You’re back home. Your parents moved away. Aaron is dead. But now I wake up to reality, and I get on with the day. Sometimes—Fridays, mostly—I even look forward to it. “I’m going out with some friends tonight.”
Her face brightens immediately. “Really? What friends? Do I know them?”
A hot prickle of shame blooms on my neck, at the backs of my arms. Yeah, Mom, I imagine saying, It’s the lawyer. The blonde, the one you said was made of stone. The one who slid a packet of papers across the table at you, the one who looked you straight in the eye when she asked you to sign. “No,” I say. “No one you know.”
“Well, I’m so glad you’re getting out there.” Jesus. She sounds so much like my mom again. So much like the woman who used to cheer our most minuscule achievements at the breakfast table. I feel an answering tug of hope inside me. “Is Pop around?”
But it’s too much to hope for. Her face falls, though she tries to hide it. “He’s not up for talking much today, Aiden.”
I know what that means. He’s either sleeping or crying, or staring at the television, unseeing. I turn my head from the screen, pretend to look out the window. “I’d better get going. Lots to do before I head out tonight.”
She smiles through the screen, nodding proudly. “Have a good time. You deserve to have a great time.”
When we log off, I stare again at the nearly blank page on my screen, Mom’s words echoing around me. What would she think, knowing that the promise of a good time tonight lives entirely in Zoe Ferris? It’s not even about the possibility of sleeping with her again—we only do that in the cabin, away from all this. It’s that Zoe is a good time, even when she’s not, even when she’s pissing me off or calling me on my shit, there’s something about her that gets me right out of myself.
I reach a hand out, shut off the monitor, and watch the screen fade to black.
Maybe I’ll be able to tell the story tomorrow.
* * * *
Never is the difference between me and Ahmed more clear than when we go to a party for someone neither of us knows. When we walk up to Henry Tucker’s house, Ahmed is loose and easy, telling me about some buddy of his who grew up nearby, asking whether I’ve ever been to the salvage yard Tucker apparently owns. I barely hear any of it, because I’ve gone tense all over, silent and sweaty underneath my button-up. In the past three and a half weeks I’ve done more socializing than I have in the entire year and a half since Aaron died, and while this afternoon I’d been congratulating myself about getting a little better, I find that now, in the face of the damn thing, I’m rattled by the thought of a houseful of people I hardly know.
It’s Kit who I see first, petite and smiling near the front door, but I don’t miss the way that smile changes when her dark eyes fall on me. She’s kind but wary, same as she was the first time I met her at Betty’s, and back then, it hadn’t much bothered me. If I thought anything about it at all, it was probably some kind of surprise at Zoe having such loyal, protective friends. But now, I feel a fresh wave of nerves as I look down at her, five feet two of You’d better not fuck with my friend. It doesn’t matter what Zoe and I have agreed on in the dark, our mouths melded together and our hands all over each other. I’m here at this party, with her friends, and that doesn’t feel like just sex. It feels like I’m trying to make a good impression.
“Ahmed, good to see you again,” she says, ushering him farther in, and laughing as she accepts the giant hug he gives her, a move he pulls off more naturally than I ever could. “Aiden, thanks for coming,” she says, choosing a more measured handshake.
“Sure, thanks for the invite. Looks like you’ve put together a nice welcome.” The small house is crowded, full of laughing conversation.
“Yeah, it turned out well. Your friend Charlie’s not coming?”
“She’s in D.C.,” I say. “Went up to see her wife.”
“Oh, I’m glad for her,” she says, smiling. Kit seems like a nice person, a genuine person, which somehow makes it all the worse that she’s got a more guarded opinion about me.
“Hi,” comes a voice from beside me, and there she is, those gold-brown eyes looking at me expectantly, and I forget all about Kit only seeming half-glad to see me. Zoe looks glad. Glad and also fucking gorgeous. Her hair’s pulled back, but already some of those silky-straight strands have fallen around her face, and her cheeks are flushed from the warm room, the crush of people. Her dress looks to me like a long men’s shirt, dark blue, but she’s got it belted at the waist, a pair of boots that come up to her knees, and in between those and the hem of the dress is the skin that I felt against my hips last weekend, the skin I stroked while I moved inside her.
“Hey,” I say to her. I barely notice that Ahmed’s already moved into the living room, shaking hands and looking like he’s been here dozens of times before.
“I wanted to introduce you to Ben,” she says, turning her eyes up to a tall, smiling guy I hadn’t even registered as a presence. “This party is for him.”
“Hey, man,” I say, practically tearing my eyeballs from her. “Good to meet you.”
“Yeah, you too.” He shakes my hand firmly before wrapping an arm around Kit, pulling her close to his side.
“Welcome home. Bet you’re glad to be back.”
“You have no idea.” But he’s not looking at me when he says it. He’s looking down at Kit, his eyes soft on her in a way that makes me slide my gaze over to Zoe, who seems to have developed a real interest in scrutinizing the contents of her plastic cup. When Ben looks back up at me, though, something’s shifted in his expression. “I know you’ve got Z doing this camp thing with you,” he says, abruptly, and Zoe’s head snaps up. “Ben,” she says, her voice low in warning.
“She’s got a lot of people who love her,” says Ben, not taking his eyes off me. This fucking guy, I’m thinking, but at the same time I already like him, like his directness. His care for Zoe.
Zoe laughs, an edge of nervousness to it. “It’s probably like, four people, grand total,” she says. “Three if I don’t count my mother, and today she called and asked me if I’d mind her throwing out my christening gown, so I’m pretty sure she—”
“Zo,” I say, and as soon as it comes out of my mouth I know I’ve done that shit on purpose. This is what I call her, I’m saying. I curl a hand around her elbow and squeeze gently, a brief touch that’s friendlier than how I feel right now, which is—I don’t know what. Possessive. A little angry. Half of me wants to be touching her like Ben touches Kit—like she’s mine, like I do it every day. The other half of me is pissed that I want to, and that I can’t. We don’t do that here; we decided. Here, I’m the guy she’s invited because of courtesy, or maybe because of her friends’ curiosity. “It’s all right,” I tell her, before I look up at Ben and give him a short nod. “I know she does.”
Ben’s got a calm, friendly face, something open about his expression that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen in myself in the mirror. Still, though—he looks at me long enough that the silence feels noticeable, a few seconds shy of truly uncomfortable. “Can I get you a beer?”
The look on Zoe’s face when he asks is pure relief, so plain and honest that I touch her again, my palm at her shoulder, a brief, calming circle that Ben and Kit both notice. It’s the kind of touch that doesn’t have anything to do with “this camp thing,” and for a second it feels like Zoe and I are the only two people in the room.
It’s only a quick moment of peace and quiet, though, because the place is full up, more people coming in behind me, and Zoe gets pulled into conversation after conversation. For a while, I stay with her, nursing a beer and letting her introduce me to each group of people she says hello to. “This is my friend Aiden,” she says. “He saved me from a face full of driveway a month ago.” It’s so simple, the way she puts it, and aside from the face full of driveway part, I wish I had met her in circumstances so simple. I shake hands, nod, answer what questions I’m asked, and feel as if I’m stretching muscles I haven’t used in months.
I know I’m meeting Ben’s father even before Zoe tells me his name. The guy looks like Ben coming out of a time machine, and he’s got the same easy smile.
“O’Leary,” he repeats, when Zoe introduces me, a searching look as he shakes my hand. “Your mother’s Kathleen?”
“Uh, yeah,” I say, taken aback.
“I sold her a Gorham brush and mirror set about ten years ago, I think...1959, silver detail like you wouldn’t believe.”
Beside me, Zoe drops back, joins another conversation that’s in progress behind us, and I know that’s on purpose. It’s the same at camp: any mention of my family, and she goes quiet. “Must be quite a memory you’ve got.”
“Almost forgot to put on underwear today,” he says, laughing. “I only remember the stuff that doesn’t matter.”
“I think she bought that set for my cousin’s sixteenth birthday. So it matters to someone, anyway.”
Henry smiles, claps me on the shoulder. “I like you,” he says, and I feel a choking, painful longing for my own dad, whose shoulder-clapping was pretty much the only brand of affection he had on offer, but he didn’t spare it. “Your mom still around town?”
“She and my pop moved to Florida a few months back.”
Henry nods, looks around the room to where Ben stands, now laughing with Ahmed. Fast friends, those two, and I try not to feel an illogical sense of jealousy about Med’s easy nature, his ability to do with Zoe’s friends what I can’t. “Good to have my kid back in town,” he says, more to himself than to me. This sentiment kicks me right where it hurts too. When I’d decided to move here, I’d wondered fleetingly if my parents might change their minds about Florida and stick around. I was back, after all, their only surviving son, and that had to mean something. But the truth is, our family doesn’t make sense without Aaron. I don’t make sense without Aaron. I’m just a remainder, a great big shadow left by the bomb blast of his death, and neither of my parents look at me the way Henry looks at Ben.
Suddenly this party feels like a colossal mistake, a reminder of why Zoe and I need to keep it at camp, and a reminder of why I’ve kept things so close since I’ve been home. I’m not suited for any of this right now—I feel like I’m in a room of salt pillars, rubbing all my open wounds up against them as I go. With as much friendliness as I can manage, I disentangle myself from the conversation with Henry, take advantage of Zoe’s distraction and duck into the kitchen where I can rinse out my beer bottle. I’ll tell Ahmed the night’s over for me. He can stay if he wants, Uber it home, whatever. But me, I’ve got to get out of here.
“Hello,” says a soft voice from behind me, and it’s just—fuck. I don’t feel like talking to anyone. But when I turn I’m staring down into the big blue eyes of Zoe’s friend Greer, who’s holding a plate of appetizers out to me like she’s on server duty. “I thought you might want some food.”
Jesus Christ. I do not want some food. I want to get the fuck out of here. But something stops me, some hope that I can make a good impression. I take the plate and manage a polite thank-you. It’s quieter back here, a bit distant from the crowd, and it feels like she’s cornered me on purpose. I take a bite of a stuffed mushroom, not really hungry but eager to have something to do with my hands, my mouth. In some ways, Greer seems tougher than Kit is—there’s no caution or suspicion in her eyes, but instead something deep and knowing, ready to see right through any of your bullshit.
As soon as I swallow she speaks, timing it perfectly so I can’t weasel out of responding without being obvious about it.
“We miss Zoe around here on the weekends,” she says, leaning against the counter, skipping all the preliminaries. What she needs to know about me, Zoe’s probably already told her. “We have routines, the three of us.”
“Brunch,” I say, wiping my mouth with the small napkin she’d tucked under my plate. “She told me.”
Greer nods, seeming pleased that I’d know, or maybe that I’d remember. “She—well. She’s sort of our center point. The one we take our cues from, in some ways. Everything’s quieter without her.”
Ain’t that the truth is the first thing that comes to mind, because everything is quieter without her. Even when she’s right next to me, if she’s not talking, it somehow feels like the loudest quiet I’ve ever heard. “Three more weeks,” I say, but I don’t know if I’m really talking to her or to myself.
Greer looks up at me, a small wrinkle in her brow as she tilts her head slightly. “Sometimes I wonder if she’ll still be a little quieter, once the time’s up.”
Before I have time to think it through—to wonder if this is just an observation or a warning or maybe some kind of revelation about Zoe’s feelings toward me, I hear Zoe call out Greer’s name from the other room. I look over my shoulder to see her weaving her way toward the kitchen. “Are you trying to see Aiden’s chest hair?” she calls, loud enough that a few people nearby laugh.
Greer’s face has gone all pink beneath her freckles, and she rushes out a quick, “Oh, she’s joking about—some…thing I said one time?”
Zoe sidles up beside me, nudges my shoulder with her own. “Just on my way out back,” she says, nodding her head toward the door. “We need to bring in another cooler. Greer, Sharon’s looking for you.” She levels her friend with a look, something secret communicated between them. Greer’s curving smile looks gentle, approving—and I feel a strange thread of guilt. Here I am, with the people who mean the most to Zoe, people who mean more to her than I ever will. And I can’t even admit her existence to my own mother.
“Thanks for the food,” I tell Greer before she heads off, and she gives me a casual wave, as though she fully expects to see me again sometime.
Once we clear the door, I feel a clutching relief, not just at the big inhale of fresh air I take, but at being alone with Zoe for the first time tonight. “Hot in there,” I say.
She nods, fanning her face, looking as grateful for the break as I am. “It’s exhausting.”
“That’s on account of you working so hard, I’m guessing,” I say, ignoring the skeptical look she casts my way. But she was working hard in there, circulating and delivering drinks and making introductions, and I’ll bet she’s the one who noticed about the cooler. It’s like Greer said—she’s the fixed point in the room, the one everyone tends to orbit around, and this party’s not even for her.
I tilt my head back to look at the dark, clear sky above. At camp, you’d be able to see the stars by now, I’m guessing, and I let that thought settle over me, think about how my everyday view stands to change now. “I decided I’m going to take on the management role,” I say, surprising myself, and surprising her, I guess, because I see in my peripheral vision the way her head snaps my way. “You were right.”
“I didn’t say—” she begins, at the same time I say, “I want to do right by Paul and Lorraine. And my brother.”
And whatever she was going to say, she stops, and there’s a long silence, heavy with something unspoken. I lower my head, look over at her, see where she’s got the inside of her cheek caught between her teeth. Tell me, I’m thinking. Tell me what that look on your face is all about. But all she says is, “That’s great. You’ll be great.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” But it feels hollow, this exchange, and suddenly whatever’s inside that party feels preferable to the loaded moment out here.
I hear her take a deep breath, and then she raises her chin too, the long column of her throat pale in the dim light from the porch. “I’ve got a decision to make too, I think. I had this interview. To do some volunteering.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She tells me about it, never looking my way—legal advising, she says, for people who can’t afford it. At every turn, I hear what she’s doing, stuffing her language full of conditionals even as she fills me in: if I get it. I’ve never really done most of the kinds of cases they get. I’m not sure it’s the right time. I’ve never been that good with people.
“You’re good with people,” I say, at that last one.
She laughs, that sharp edge of sarcasm elbowing me right in the ribs, and I keep quiet. It seems like she feels the silence more, and I don’t mind it, not right now. It bothers me, this thing with Zoe, that she’s talking herself out of this gig. She’d be good—I meant what I said that night at the bonfire. She’s smart as fuck, a hell of a lawyer, no matter what it cost my family personally.
An idea takes shape in my mind as I look up at the stars, as I think about the weekend ahead at camp.
I can feel her look over at me, and after a minute I lower my head, catch her with eyes narrowed in suspicion. She knows my body like I know hers now. For a second it looks like she might say something, her full lips parting before closing again, pursing slightly in a way that sends a pulse of heat to my cock. She doesn’t try again, only heads over to the large blue cooler set on the concrete patio. I move quicker, bending down to pick it up.
“Okay, Lancelot, you can back off,” she says, nudging me. “I can pick up a cooler.”
“It’s heavy. Let me get it.” My voice is tinged with frustration, mostly because she’s bent over in that dress thing she’s wearing, and now I feel half-done-for, aroused and impatient and full of the need to get inside her again.
She pinches the back of my hand, hard, jarring me out of myself, and when I flinch it away, she grabs one handle of the cooler so now we’re sharing the weight, her side hanging lower than mine. She gives me a look like she’s captured the freaking flag, and I press down the laugh that’s suddenly sitting right behind my breastbone.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I say, no edge in it. I feel that familiar bubble of amusement alongside my desire. “You’re so stubborn.”
Her mouth opens in exaggerated shock. “I’m stubborn? I’d slap you for that, but I’d probably break my hand on that hard head of yours.” She huffs out an exasperated sigh, tugs on the cooler. “I can’t believe you’d call me stubborn, when you—”
“Don’t,” I say, tugging on my end. “Don’t bring up the thing about driving.”
“It’s like you think I can’t drive.”
“I know you can drive. I just prefer to drive.”
“Because you’re stubborn!”
“Zo,” I say, keeping my voice calm, which gets her all the more riled up. “What do you ask Hammond every time we have breakfast at the lodge? Every. Fucking. Time?”
Even in the dim light from the porch lamp, I can see the way her face flushes. “That’s not the same.”
“Every time, you ask him if he wants eggs.”
“Aiden, it’s rude about the cereal. If Lorraine makes eggs, he shouldn’t ask for cereal!” She blows a strand of hair away from her face, tugging again at the cooler, hard enough that her breasts move beneath the fabric of her shirt, dress, whatever the hell that thing is. Jesus, she’s hot. If we were having this fight in the cabin, I’d have it up around her waist by now.
“But Lorraine doesn’t care. Which means you shouldn’t care. You’re the stubborn one.”
“I am not—”
“Will you just let me take the fucking cooler?”
“Oh my God. I lift weights three days a week, Aiden. It’s not even heavy. It’s not like your dick is going to shrink if I—”
“Is everything okay out there?”
Zoe and I both freeze, straightening up like we actually have been caught with her dress up around her waist. For a second, our eyes widen comically at each other, and I can tell Zoe’s trying not to laugh.
“Everything’s fine, Kit,” she says.
“Were you yelling at her?” Kit says to me, her eyes narrowed.
Zoe snorts. “I think we both know it’s me doing all the yelling. We’re having a—” She breaks off, looks over at me again, her mouth curving upward into something wicked. “Aiden doesn’t think women should drive.”
Kit looks at me like I’ve just belched at her dinner table.
“I don’t think that,” I say, quickly.
“Probably he doesn’t think we should have the vote.”
I bark out a laugh, before I can stop it. “Zo,” I say, “stop. Please.” The look on Zoe’s face—it’s a mixture of amusement and triumph, and I know the triumph isn’t about embarrassing me in front of her friends. It’s about the laugh she’s gotten out of me.
Kit is looking back and forth between us, something speculative in her expression. Right then, Zoe drops her end of the cooler, leaving me to scramble before it hits the concrete patio, ice and drinks clattering together inside the thick plastic. I hear her satisfied chuckle. “Time for toasts?” she asks Kit.
“Yeah,” Kit says, her eyes resting on me again, briefly, a smile playing on her lips before she looks back at Zoe. “Help me pour some champagne?”
“Sure,” Zoe says, and walks up the steps. Before she crosses into the house, she looks over her shoulder at me and winks.
And it’s right then I know: we’re breaking that only-in-the-cabin rule tonight.