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’ve 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.
“Phantom limb,” my partner had muttered as we got to work, but even though I’d known about this from years of training, had seen it time and time again, I’d felt those two words like a punch to my face. That’s what I have, I’d thought. I have a phantom limb.
I’d obsessed over the idea at first, clinging to it as an explanation for the literal, physical, pain I’d felt since Aaron died, an aching in my joints that never seemed to leave me. But after a while, it wasn’t enough of an explanation. I didn’t have a phantom limb, after all. I had a phantom self. I was half myself without Aaron; I always would be. When I’d looked down at that little girl last weekend, I’d had about fifteen different feelings all at once, more feelings than I’m used to having in a single day, and the worst one, the worst one of all, was jealousy. I was fucking jealous of her, the way she’d looked over at her twin. I could remember the way that felt, to find Aaron in a room. Like the ground underneath me got more stable.
I should be annoyed, maybe, at what Charlie’s said. Married to Autumn for a year and saying she’s her other half? Six months ago, I would’ve been so bothered that I would’ve had to leave the room. You don’t understand, I would’ve thought. You could never understand. But I don’t feel annoyed, not even a little. If Charlie feels even a quarter of what I felt over my brother, I hope something turns around for her, and soon. I hope she goes up there this weekend and they work it out. The same way I woke up on Sunday and hoped I hadn’t hurt that little girl’s feelings.
I shut off the TV, listening to the slight crackle of the dispatch radio in the other room. I don’t want to think too hard about why I feel different now than I did six months ago. It feels a little like betrayal, like having that fight with Aaron all over again: You do everything without me. Here I am, in our hometown, at my job, with people who I get closer to calling friends every day. It’s just time, I guess—that fucker keeps moving forward, no matter how you try to stay perfectly still in your anger. It’s time that’s changing me, that’s all.
But hell if I don’t think, just for a second, about a pair of gold-brown eyes staring up at me. Hell if I don’t think of her, laying something else on the line about herself, so she can save my ass again.
* * * *
Those gold-brown eyes are lowered—shy, even—when we get to the cabin on Friday afternoon and Zoe pulls my binder out of her pack, holding it out to me.
“I made some suggestions,” she says, when I take it. There are bright pink tabs sticking out the sides, a couple of them with her handwriting squeezed on. “You don’t have to use any of them, obviously,” she says, turning away to tuck a few items of clothing into her drawer. We’ve got a system now: she takes the three drawers on the left, and I take the two on the right. She always uses the bathroom stall closest to the door, and prefers if I never use that one. She gets in bed first, turns over, and then I change after. She likes to leave the light on at night in the entryway, which I almost always forget until she says, “Light on, please,” in this snippy voice that I find weirdly hot, especially right before I get in bed. In the mornings, I get up first, pull on pants and a sweatshirt, and go out to the stoop and wait. Twice I’ve had to piss so bad that I’ve had to walk out into the woods and relieve myself.
“Thanks,” I tell her. “You want to—” I’m about to ask her if she wants to go over them together, but she grabs her phone and a pair of headphones from the side pocket of her pack.
“I missed my workout today so I’m going to head out for a walk,” she says.
The weird thing is, I can tell she’s lying. At first, of course, I thought Zoe was lying all the time. But it’s this small, harmless fib—her not wanting to be around me while I look at her notes—that gives me a glimpse of what she looks like when she’s really lying, or at least when she’s lying to me: she blinks twice, rapidly, and I can tell she’s caught the inside of her cheek with her teeth.
“Which trail?” I ask her.
“What?”
“Tell me which trail. So I know where you’ve gone.” She rolls her eyes, but I’m not budging on this. It’s broad daylight and the safest place I know in the world, but I follow the rules around here, and one of them is to always tell someone where you’ve gone.
“The one headed toward the swimming hole.”
“Fine, east trail. Stay on it, all right?”
“God. Do you need to see my permission slip too?”
“Do you have one to show me?” I don’t know why, but it sounds a little dirty, the way I’ve said it. Damn, I must need a nap. I take the binder over to my bunk, flop down, and rest it on my chest, close my eyes. “See you in an hour.”
“I didn’t say I’d be back in an hour.”
I crack open my eyes and look over to where she stands, her hands on her hips. “An hour, or I’ll come looking for you. Keep your phone on.”
She slams the door behind her, and I’m smiling, a hot rush of something like gratitude that we’re still this way, still rough and tumble, still back and forth.
I tell myself I’ll rest my eyes for a minute or two, then get to work. I don’t want her coming back here thinking I don’t care about the work she’s done. But I must doze off, because the next thing I hear is the thud of footsteps out on the stoop, the door opening and then quickly slamming shut, Zoe’s heavy breathing and a muttered curse.
I’m off the bed as quick as I can be without knocking my head into something, the binder falling to the floor while I rush into the entryway. “What happened?” I say, taking in her flushed cheeks, the twig she’s got stuck in her hair. I have a brief, thudding moment of panic—is this not the safest place I know in the world? Holy fuck, could something have happened to her out there?
“Jesus, Aiden!” she shouts, interrupting my thoughts. “It’s like—I don’t know what! It’s Cocktoberfest out there! At the swimming hole, I mean! Just—just—a whole lot of naked dudes!”
I blink, taking a second to process what she’s said—Cocktoberfest?—and then I nearly double over with laughter, not only at her crass language but at her wide-eyed expression, the pink flags of color high on her cheekbones. “Stop laughing at me! Why did you let me go out there?”
“I didn’t know anyone would be out there,” I say, between breaths of continued laughter.
“I saw Paul do a cannonball! In the nude!”
“Wow,” I say, rubbing a hand over my hair, down my face, schooling my expression. “It’s always the quiet ones, though.”
“Oh my God,” she says, fanning her face. “I haven’t been this traumatized since I saw Simon Callow’s penis in A Room with a View.”
“Is that porn or something?”
“Porn?!” she shouts, shocked. “It’s Merchant Ivory, you heathen!”
I don’t know what Merchant Ivory is; maybe it’s upscale porn or something, but I add it to the mental list of things Zoe says that I’ll have to Google later. She’s at the sink, washing her hands vigorously, mumbling to herself.
“You didn’t get a handful of anything, did you?” I nod toward her busy hands, trying to keep down the smile that’s threatening to break my face wide open.
“A handful…? What! No.” She looks down at her hands bemusedly, shuts off the water, and shakes them over the sink. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m in shock!”
“I should’ve warned you. It’s kind of an old tradition around here, jumping naked into the swimming hole before it gets too cold. Paul and some of the staff and a few of his buddies from the area usually do it.”
“Well, I guess!” She’s turned to face me, crossing her arms over her chest, and I realize something—it’s the first time, between me and Zoe, that things feel comfortable, that there isn’t something a little ugly between us, the lie we’re both telling sitting heavily on both our shoulders. This moment—this funny shock she’s had, it could have happened to anyone, to someone I was really with, someone who was here by choice and not because of guilt. And now that she’s settled, she’s smiling too, leaning back against the sink and shaking her head in disbelief.
“I’m pretty sure they saw me too,” she says, and then she laughs, bold and expansive, same as the way she speaks. “I think I gave this—like, squeak? Sort of a meep! noise?”
Oh, man. She fucking does the noise, the meep! she describes, and damn, it’s cute, and the ribbon of laughter she lets out after sends a shot of heat straight to my dick.
“Didn’t count you for a prude, Zo,” I say, not even thinking about it, and her laughing eyes snap to mine, widening for just a second at the nickname. The implication of it. That we’re friends, that we’re close.
It feels like I’ve removed an article of her clothing.
I wait, holding my breath, for her to correct me.
But she doesn’t. She smiles and says, “I’m really, really not. But I met my penis threshold. A couple of them, all right, but more than seven and I go nonverbal.”
“Maybe it was Paul’s. Paul’s dick is your threshold.”
“Don’t talk about it!” she exclaims, but then she’s laughing again, her hands coming up to cover her face.
And I don’t know what it is, when she lowers her hands. I don’t know if it’s the fatigue or the shock of adrenaline I got, waking up to the sound of her coming back in, fast and breathless, or maybe it’s the fact that I now know what Zoe’s laugh—her real, spontaneous laugh—sounds like, but before I can think of what I’m doing, I’m taking a step toward her, reaching out a hand. I’m trailing my fingers across the blush that’s settled high on her cheekbones, running them across that soft swoop of skin to tuck a length of hair behind her ear.
And—oh, fuck. I’ve touched her before, but not so many times that I still can’t count them—a count I’ve actually made, one sleepless night last week. But I’ve never reached out to touch her like this, just for my own benefit, just to feel her skin against mine. It’s the work of a second, maybe two or three, to make that journey across her face, to feel the tickling strands of her hair between my fingers, but it’s enough to make her breath hitch and her flush deepen.
I don’t linger. Because I know if I do, I’m going to let that hand trace down her neck, down to that vee of skin that’s showing between the two open buttons of her flannel shirt.
I step back, my smile fading along with Zoe’s. She clears her throat and straightens up from the sink. “Did you look at my notes?”
It’s possible I’m working up a flush of my own—my neck feels hot underneath my collar—and I turn toward the main room. “Was just now getting to it.” She doesn’t respond, and when I look back at her, she’s still by the sink, looking toward the door.
“I should probably go back out, take a different trail.”
“Chicken,” I mutter, smiling to myself about this old insult I’ve drudged up, straight out of a file of immature shit I used to say when I was an actual camper here.
“What?”
“You heard me,” I say, picking up the binder from the floor, sitting back on my bunk. “You don’t want to be around while I look at this.”
“I don’t care when you look at it,” she snaps, but even she’s got to know how childish she sounds. She comes in behind me, sits on the bunk beneath her own, so we’re facing each other. When I look across at her, I have to fight another smile. She’s trying to keep up that stiff posture, but she’s too tall for it with the top bunk in her way, so she scoots forward, crossing one leg over the other, folding her hands in her lap, like that first day she sat in my kitchen. “Anyways, they’re just suggestions,” she says, when I open the front cover.
She doesn’t move while I read over the list she’s tucked into the front pocket, a summary of the changes she’s made, small arrows instead of bullet points, her tidy script in sharp, black ink. “You sit in the front row a lot at school?” I ask her, recalling that first meeting we had in the outdoor classroom.
“I sat wherever I wanted to, Boy Scout,” she says, smirking at me when I meet her eyes. Damn, I’ll bet. I’ll bet she’s the smartest person in any room she’s in. There’s that hot feeling, right around my collar, and I look back down at the binder in my lap, grateful for something else to focus on.
Zoe’s copied my schematic for the Wilderness/Wellness site onto one of those clear sheets my elementary school teachers used to use on the overhead projectors and mapped it onto Lorraine and Paul’s cartoonish map of the campground, a numbered x by all the major components. Then she’s written out a plan for a tour of it, pieces of my original presentation in the binder tabbed to the various “stops” she’s planned.
“It’s not that the spreadsheets are gone,” she says. “But they’re supplements now. And if you do this right, Lorraine and Paul will be interested enough to look at supplementary materials.”
“Right,” I say, in plain, stupid shock at all she’s done. “It’s a—so it’s a tour?”
She shrugs. “After Val, I figure everyone else is going to follow the leader. Don’t be surprised if Tom and Sheree bring some of the kids from his program in Shaftesbury Park for tomorrow. It’ll be in the lodge, the projector, the PowerPoint, the whole thing. Val set the tone, I’m telling you. If we go last and do that, we look like we’re falling in line. We’ve got to do something more memorable. Paul and Lorraine have lived their whole lives on this land. We show them your vision for it, while we’re actually out on it, and they’ll remember.”
“It’s a good idea,” I say.
“It’s a great idea. Ideal if the weather is perfect, but even if it’s not—Paul and Lorraine won’t care, and I’m guessing you won’t, either. It’ll work.”
I’m blinking down at the binder, at everything she’s managed to do in less than a week, stunned and grateful and a little embarrassed. Even on the page I’m looking at, I can see a mistake, where I typed Widlerness instead of Wilderness. She must think I’m an idiot.
“I don’t have the story, though,” she says, interrupting my thoughts. “Everything you have in there is important. You’re going to have to find a way to say it all. But I don’t have the story for this. That’s down to you. You’ve got to be able to tell them why this matters.”
I reach up one hand, rub it up the back of my neck, where my muscles are tight with fatigue. She doesn’t have to say it. I know what she’s talking about. I know who she’s talking about. Lorraine and Paul knew Aaron, and they loved him. They’ll want to hear that I’m doing this for him. Help me tell it, I’m thinking, deep down inside myself, but I don’t know who I’m thinking it to. To her? Because that’s ridiculous. No matter how I feel about her now—Cocktoberfest and her laugh and the feel of her skin—there’s still this thing between us, this thing about Aaron that brought us together in the first place. This obligation she’s fulfilling to me and my family.
As if she’s heard what I’m thinking, she smooths her hands down her thighs, stands from where she sits on the bunk. When she speaks, her voice is cool again, no trace of that big laugh. You’d never imagine this is a woman who’d make a noise like meep! in embarrassed shock. “There’s only so much of this debt I can work off, Aiden.”
There’s no reason why it should hurt, what she’s said. It’s only exactly what I was thinking. It’s only exactly what this thing we’re doing is all about.
There’s no reason why it should, but it does.