Chapter 19
Zoe
The truth is, it feels sort of good to be alone.
I’m home after another full day of work at Legal Aid, where I’ve spent almost every day for the last two weeks, calling people on that log list like it’s a literal lifeline. They’re not short calls, and they’re not always wrapped up after a single conversation. I did four calls last week with a Mrs. Adelaide Martin, an eighty-six-year-old widow who’d had her identity stolen and who’d never used the internet in her life. By the fourth call, she’d started calling me darling and invited me to play bridge on Saturday with her friends at Sunset Terrace.
I’m probably going to go. Adelaide seems like good people.
But doing the calls, working with Marisela and the other full-time staff, getting to know some of the volunteers who come in, usually around the time I’m leaving for the day—it’s a reminder, I guess, of the time I used to need after work to unwind, not talk, let my mind quiet down. And there’s been little time for that, because Kit and Greer have been on full-time Zoe watch, dinners here or at one of their places, an extra spinning class or two, manufactured reasons why one or both of them needs to come over. “Ben’s sanding the floor in the guest bedroom,” Kit had said one day last week when she’d come over with an overnight bag and an absolutely unconvincing expression of desperation. “It makes my eyes itchy.” No way would Ben want Kit sleeping elsewhere after so short a time, and Kit’s eyes looked just fine to me, but she’d come in and we’d watched three episodes of a home renovation show, during which Kit made loud complaints about how much “perfectly good stuff” the hosts kept throwing away from the houses. The very next night it’d been Greer, swearing that her older sister—also her roommate—had a very important third date, and she wanted to give them some privacy. I’d helped her study for a sociology exam, but I’m pretty sure she was faking her efforts to recall key details about toxic masculinity and intersectional feminism. In fact I’m pretty sure she’d taken that exam already, but I’d played along.
They’re worried, which is fair enough. It was only a couple of months ago, after all, that I’d been putting up Kit while she’d been split up from Ben, and during those few weeks Greer and I had done everything short of asking for biometric stress tests to judge her mental health. But at this point I’m getting the sense of how overwhelming all that attention can be. Even my mother seems worried; when we video-chatted last night she asked if I was forgetting under-eye cream, which is basically a DEFCON 1 level of concern coming from her. Of course she also asked if I’d mind celebrating Christmas in February this year so that she could go on a cruise with her new boyfriend, so I guess there’s still a limit to her maternal instincts.
But tonight I’ve managed to convince everyone to give me a little space, and their willingness to let this pass gives me hope that I’m getting better.
Still, I’m no dummy. I know that I’m no good with unstructured time—see, obviously, the last several months of my life—so I’ve made a plan, at least for this evening.
The guilt vase is still on my dining room table, empty now. I’d dumped the slips a couple of nights after the campground debacle, not angrily or sadly or hastily. Just—quietly. I’d looked at each one before I’d dropped it in the recycling bin, knowing, of course, that I wouldn’t forget any of them. I’m the vase, that’s the thing. That’s the truth about making mistakes, about making the wrong choices. You live with them, and if you’re lucky you get enough perspective to see where you went astray. You figure out what you can do to repair the damage, and you figure out how to do better going forward.
And no one would say I’m not lucky.
Still, it takes me a little while to rally myself to my task—too much time lingering over my dinner, too high of a word count responding to a simple message about condo board business, too-careful research into the next round of cooking classes Janet and I will start in a couple of weeks.
Finally, I remind myself that this is a modest task. A small, unselfish, honest gesture, the kind of thing I should’ve have done all those weeks ago. The kind of thing that’s not about my guilt, but about someone else’s feelings.
I pick up the phone and dial.
“Hi, Lorraine,” I say, when she answers.
“Oh, Zoe,” she says, or…sighs, I guess, the sound in her voice a combination of relief and sadness.
“I hope it’s okay that I’m calling.”
“Of course it’s okay. I was hoping you’d call.”
I take a deep breath through my nose, let it out slowly before I speak again. “I just needed to tell you, Lorraine, both you and Paul, how sorry I am about being dishonest. There’s no excuse for my part in this. You made me feel so welcome, and I loved every minute of my time in Stanton Valley. And I—well. I apologize sincerely.”
“Not every minute,” she says.
“What?”
“We both know you didn’t love every minute. That first weekend you worked so hard I felt like I ought to write you a check at the end, and that’s back when I thought you were in it for real.”
It lands heavily, despite her light tone, for all kinds of reasons—she’s right, of course, and I don’t deserve to have it sugarcoated. But it’s so complicated. It was so complicated, even on that first weekend. I was in it for real, even then, even though I hadn’t known then what Aiden would mean to me, what I’d come to feel for him. “I guess that’s true,” I say, standing from my seat at the dining room table so I can pace around, work off some nerves, while we do this. “But even then I liked it. I liked you, and Paul.” I pause, unsure of how much to say next. I don’t know how much she knows about Aiden and me now—I’d left the lodge before anyone had asked whether we’d ever even managed to become friends over the course of our ruse. “I liked everyone, really.”
“Hammond could use some improvement,” she says, and we both laugh a little, before the line between us goes quiet again. I pass into the kitchen, grab the sponge off the rim of my sink, and scrub at a nonexistent spot on the counter.
“Lorraine, I am sorry.”
“Oh, honey. I know you are. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t upset at the both of you for what you did. It really threw me and Paul for a loop. I don’t think it was any secret from you that we’ve always felt real strong toward Aiden, and this has been a disappointment.”
I take a deep breath, take in that disappointment. Own my part in it. I put the sponge back.
“But,” she says, her voice gentle, “I really appreciate you calling me, and saying what you said. That means a lot.”
How simple it is, I think, to do this with Lorraine. How grateful I am for that. How lucky I am to know her. “I’d like to come there, sometime, and tell you and Paul in person, but I didn’t want to just show up unannounced.” I’ve learned my lesson about that. “I know I sort of ran off there at the end. I’m sorry for that too.”
Lorraine makes a funny clucking noise, tongue snapping against teeth. “I can’t say I blame you for it. Quite an afternoon, wasn’t it?”
I close my eyes at the thought of it. I’ve done my best, over the last couple of weeks, not to conjure it all up in my head—Aiden’s face especially, arrested in dread and fear and something like anger. Instead, when I think of him, I make valiant, rarely successful efforts to remember the best moments I had with him with a sort of distant placidity. This is the healthy thing to do, I tell myself, the thing that shows I’m over it—if I can just look back fondly on it all, appreciate it for the moments that were good, I’ll feel less hollow. Eventually, I tell myself, I’ll be able to see it all for what it was, what I promised myself it would be: a fling, great sex with a nice guy, all of it with an expiration date. It’d only come sooner than what I’d expected, and that’s okay. That happens.
“Well, you know,” I say, searching for a bit of that mature, thoughtful distance now, “I’m sure it made it easier for Aiden and his mom to have me out of the picture, so maybe it wasn’t all bad.”
“Uh-huh,” says Lorraine, clearly unconvinced. In the brief quiet after, I want to ask her what’s happened with the campground—whether she and Paul made their decision and announced it last week, as they’d originally planned, or whether Aiden’s and my mess had ruined that too. But I don’t think I’m entitled to ask after that information. If she volunteers it, okay—but if not, it’s not my place to know.
“Have you heard from him?” she asks, interrupting my thoughts.
“Not really.” I don’t want to explain to Lorraine that I ignored three calls from him, all made on that night I’d left, that I’d waited, half in hope, half in fear, for him to call again in the days after.
He didn’t.
“Have you?” I ask, doing my best to sound as if I’m just asking after the weather.
“Paul spoke to him last week.” I want to know about that call so bad that I pick up the sponge again, just to have something to squeeze in my hand.
“Ah.” I can’t manage anything else.
“You were so convincing,” Lorraine says then, surprising me, and I slump back against the counter, waiting for what she’ll say next, knowing it won’t be easy. I should have figured it wouldn’t be so quick. “I guess I’d be more angry at that, Zoe, if I thought it was possible for the both of you to fake it so well.”
My eyes well up with shamed tears, and I tilt the phone away from my face so she won’t hear my accompanying sniffle.
“Obviously I don’t know you all that well,” she says into the quiet I’ve left there. “But I think I know him, and boy did he look at you with something fierce in his eyes.” Like protons and electrons, I think, remembering the way Kit had teased me that night, back when I’d told her all about keeping my distance.
It’s embarrassing how much I wish that what Lorraine has said is true—that Aiden watched me, wanted me, as fiercely as he’d wanted that campground. As fiercely as he’d wanted to do something for his family.
But any hope of that had vanished when I’d seen Kathleen O’Leary that day. When I’d remembered, again, what mattered most to him, and what would and should always matter most to him.
His family. And I would never—could never—be a part of that.
“Well,” I say, lamely, “it’s complicated, I guess.”
“I guess,” she repeats, just as dully.
“Anyways,” I say, hoping she doesn’t comment on how rapidly and flippantly I’ve changed the tone. “I really appreciate you taking my call. And if you’d talk to Paul about my coming sometime—”
“Of course I will.”
“Thank you.”
“But Zoe, even if you come sometime—and we’d love to have you—I hope you’re able to put this behind you. To move on.”
“Ha,” I say, the blandest possible laugh. “That has historically not been my strong suit, Lorraine.”
“Well,” she says, her voice back to the way it always is—hopeful, encouraging, kind. “Maybe it will be this time.”
* * * *
You are qualified to file for a no-fault divorce if you—
“Zoe,” says Marisela, and I startle in place in the storage room, the stack of pamphlets I’m looking down at rustling in my hand.
“Yes,” I say, straightening my posture. “Sorry. I was going to refill the information display case out front. Seems we always run out of the divorce ones first.”
Marisela cocks her head at me, a tiny line she has between her eyebrows furrowing. “We don’t really need you to do stuff like that around here. Focus on the calls.” She says it kindly, and I clear my throat, tapping the stack against the shelf to straighten them. Add Marisela to the list of people who’ve worried, especially when I showed up here extra early this morning, a bit restless, I guess, after my call with Lorraine.
I do need to move on. I know it.
“I’m done with the log list,” I say.
“Wow,” says Marisela, genuinely impressed. I’d bask in it a little more, especially since first thing this morning the clinic posted a job ad for a full-time legal services attorney, and Marisela’s already encouraged me to apply—first with a sticky note stuck right in the center of the desk where I sit, then in an email with the job announcement attached, and then in person when I’d refilled my coffee. “Specializing in employment disputes and cases against health insurers,” she’d said, nudging me. “Someone with your corporate experience would be excellent.”
But as much as I want to apply, as much good as I think I could do—would I be doing it for the right reasons? Would I just be trying to assuage my own guilt, again? After all, it’s not like my work here is purely unselfish. Legal Aid is helping me move on, professionally speaking, making me feel good about being a lawyer again.
And most of the time, while I’m here, I also manage to avoid thinking about how I’m not moving on, personally speaking. Most of the time.
I take a deep breath, looking down at the pamphlets again.
You are qualified to file for a no-fault divorce if you have not shared any residence with your spouse for over six months—
“The phones are already ringing,” I say, casually. “I’m sure I’ll have more to handle soon.”
“Actually, you’ve got someone here waiting.”
I set down the pamphlets, a tingling unease in my fingertips. Somehow, I just know. “A walk-in?” I say, as casual as I can manage.
Marisela shrugs. “I guess. Aiden O’Leary? He says he knows you.”
I look at her, and there must be something pleading in my eyes. She seems to shift something in her posture, becoming sturdier, taller, more determined. “I’ll get him out of here. Don’t come out.”
“Oh,” I say, embarrassed, and roused by the protective instinct I still apparently have for him. “No—it’s really okay. He’s my—” This separation must be continuous, the pamphlet says. “He’s a former client. Or his family were former clients, sort of.”
“Okay,” she says, but I get the feeling I’m not going out there without Marisela right at my back. I look down at my dress, a black-and-gray tweed that is, once again, about ten times more formal than anything anyone else here wears, but I cling to the old habit, and I’m grateful for the distance it’ll surely put between me and him.
With the intention that your separation will be permanent, I read, picking up the pamphlets again and carrying them with me out into the office’s main space, feigning busyness. I’ll make this quick. Whatever he came here to say, I’ll make it quick. Maybe this will help, actually. Maybe it will help me move on.
When I look up, he’s there, just inside the front door, worn jeans and a navy t-shirt underneath an army-green utility jacket, the one he used to wear at camp sometimes. I know just how it smells, that jacket. Like cold air and woodsmoke and him. He looks so simultaneously familiar and out of place that I feel my heart tear anew.
“Here she is,” says Marisela, a little loud in my ear, seeing as how she’s standing with her shoulder practically pressed against mine. Somehow, she’s made these three words sound menacing as all hell, and I look over at her, impressed and surprised. Marisela would probably shred someone in court, and later, when my head and heart aren’t full of the man standing a few feet away from me, I’m going to ask her about that.
“Thank you,” he says, and oh. I missed the sound of his voice. I blink down at my pamphlets before looking up again.
“We can talk over here,” I say, gesturing toward the desk where I do most of my callbacks. Distant professionalism: I wear it like it’s a favorite pair of shoes.
Marisela doesn’t go back to her office, instead taking a place where the office intern usually sits. A few desks away, Marisela’s assistant Kori is on the phone, either listening to messages and recording notes on her pad or eavesdropping and doodling. I don’t really care, either way—I’m glad to have the company. Aiden’s so terminally private that I doubt he’ll have anything to say worth their hearing, and I feel my breathing slow. This will be fine, I tell myself. Separation will be permanent.
I take a seat across from him, glad for the desk between us, my hands clasped on the cheap blotter where I sometimes scribble quick notes during callbacks. I open my mouth to say something, a bland Nice to see you or a more curt What can I do for you.
But before I can, he utters a single syllable on a sigh of relief that turns my insides to buzzy snowflakes, swirling all around. “Zo.”
My knuckles turn white. “What can I do for you?”
He clears his throat, sits forward a little in the chair—too small for him, like almost all furniture is. I’d thought about that, the other night, at my condo. At how big he’d looked sitting on my breakfast stool, that awful morning he’d come to me. Like a colossus on a tiny pedestal, one that would break under his weight. “I need to say some things to you. And if you don’t want me to say them here, that’s all right. You tell me where and when.”
I look over at Kori first, who snaps her eyes back down to her pad. Definitely doodling. Marisela’s not even pretending to be busy; she’s got her arms crossed and is leaning back in that chair and looking at the back of Aiden’s head. If I felt braver, I’d tell him we should step out. Go out for coffee, take a walk, meet somewhere for a quiet, civilized debrief.
But I don’t feel brave. I feel like I’ve cried a lot of tears in the last two weeks; I feel like I’ve missed him more than I can say. I feel like I don’t trust myself alone with him, don’t trust that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself, that I wouldn’t ask for just one sniff of that jacket. Separation will be permanent. “Here’s fine.”
He nods, a new determination settling over his features, taking a deep breath before he speaks. “I wanted to tell you this story,” he says, and a ripple of something—something electric and arresting—travels up my spine. “You said, back when this thing started, you said I needed to tell a story if I wanted the camp.”
“Right,” I say, swallowing. I’m looking at a little space over his shoulder, a long-ago trick from my days in mediation. If you do it right, it seems like you’re looking the client in the eye.
“Since Aaron died,” he begins, and my eyes snap to his, where our gazes tangle for a brief, painful second. He breaks off, lowers his head, his elbows resting on his knees. He’s close enough that even in the soft clamor of the office I can hear him swallow too frequently, a click in his throat. He’s breathing sharply, inhaling through his nose, and what I realize, with a jolt of panic, is that he’s crying, or at least he’s trying not to cry.
“Let me start over,” he says. “Just let me start this over.”
“Okay.” My voice is small, unsteady, the only sound my own tight throat will allow. I wait, holding my breath, for him to collect himself, for his shoulders to rise.
“When Aaron was alive, I was never alone. Ever. Even when I moved away, even when he was at his sickest, I was never alone, not really. I never believed in all that mystical twin shit, especially because of the way—” He breaks off again, rubs a hand over his hair, back to front, that now-familiar gesture. “Because of how different Aaron and I were. People used to think I was older than him, because I was so much bigger, that I’d got held back a grade or two. But then when he died, I got it. I’ve never been so alone in my life.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, because I am. I may be done apologizing for Aaron’s death, for the job I did. But I will never stop being sorry that Aiden has this pain, no matter what’s happened with us.
He shakes his head, a firm, focused no. “You’re the hero of this story,” he says, fierce and plain, the clearest he’s spoken since he sat down. “You were my rescue boat, Zo.”
“Your—what?”
“My rescue boat. I was on this island, all by myself, and you came to rescue me.”
“Aiden, I’m not sure—”
“The island is where I’ve been since he died. Or maybe it’s where I always was, but I used to have him there with me. He died and he took half of me with him, I guess, and damn if I didn’t know what to do. Damn if I didn’t feel like I’d die on that island too.”
I flatten my hands on the blotter, purse my lips and lean forward, any movement to remind him we’re in public, that there are people listening. The Aiden I know would never want anyone to hear this. But he barrels on, talking right over my propriety, maybe even getting a little louder.
“I thought it was the camp that was going to be the making of me, or the—the remaking of me? The way I’d get put back together. But the minute I met you, Zo, I should’ve seen it was you. You came to rescue me and I should have known it a long time ago. I never laughed so much as I did with you, never in my life, and you’re probably not going to believe that, seeing as how I kept it as hidden as I kept everything else with you. But I laughed all the time, on the inside.”
My heart is beating so fast and my skin feels so flushed—I’m overwhelmed for myself, concerned for him, unsure of how I should respond to something so public, so different. His hair is a mess, and up close I can see that his t-shirt is on inside out. I lean forward, try to see if I can smell alcohol on him, even though I’ve never seen him drink more than a single beer at a time. I just—I don’t know what to do.
I cling to the only thing I can in the moment. “Did you—have you heard anything about the camp?”
He ignores me. “That day you came to see me, that was the day I got off that island. That’s the day my story got going again. You weren’t an opportunity I saw. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever said in my life, and you don’t know how much I wish I could take that back. You were the beginning of everything for me. And I know you’ve got every reason not to be with me. I panicked that day at the lodge. I couldn’t see past my own grief and guilt, couldn’t see what you’d known all along about me and that camp. And I know I’m fucked up. I know I’m grouchy and antisocial and I’m guessing your friends don’t think anything good about me at all. But I wanted to come here, and tell you that I love you.”
He’s said it loud enough that Kori gasps a little, and I’m pretty sure Marisela is giving heart eyes to the back of his head while she scoots her chair a little to the side, trying to get a better look at him. I notice these things because I don’t know what to do with what he’s just said. I’ve spent the last two weeks in hell, missing him, hating him, loving him.
Hating myself for loving him.
“I think I’ve loved you since you fainted in my driveway. Since you handed me my ass at darts. I should’ve told you that a hundred times before now. I should have followed you right out of that lodge, should have known I only had one shot to get off that island with you and I fucking blew it, and I will regret it every day of my life, Zo, I promise you that.”
“Aiden, please, this is—” This is too much, too hard, I want to say. I will never move on from this.
“I know I messed up our ending. For the story, I mean. I don’t expect anything from you. You’ve done more for me than I’ve ever deserved. But if you call me, Zo, if you ever call me, or need me, I’ll come. I owe you everything, and I will love you even if you never let me see your face again. You are the best person, my favorite person, the only person I needed to prove that there was still something good for me in this life after Aaron.”
He stands then, the chair scraping across the floor, and looks down at me, not like he’s just told me he loves me but more like he’s about to do ten paces before a duel. If I were in my right mind I’d be able to laugh at how comically, out-of-place aggressive he looks in contrast to all the perfect, soft, beautiful things he has just said.
But I’m not in my right mind. I’m in my shocked, overtired, on-the-verge-of-tears mind. I love him back—of course I love him back—but I’m hurt right down to the center of myself and I am terrified of everything. I don’t even move.
He leans across the desk and down, presses a firm kiss to the top of my head, so I’m looking right at the notch in his throat that smells so good, where I’ve pressed my nose to him a dozen times, and my eyes sting with the tears I’m holding back.
He doesn’t see them, because he doesn’t look again. He just turns and leaves the way he came, all his words clanging around the room behind him.