Chapter 2
Aiden
In my thirty-one years of life, I have said and done a lot of stupid shit, but not one single thing so stupid as saying the words Marry me to Zoe Ferris.
I don’t mean it, of course, but I don’t rush to clarify, mostly because it takes me a few seconds to get my mouth and brain reconnected. Long seconds where Zoe stays still, where I watch her profile and make sure that she’s steady and that she still has good color in her face. This is the first time I notice that she is beautiful. When I saw her first, in a small, professionally taken headshot on her former firm’s website, I did not think beyond what my intention had been: to imagine what my parents had seen that day when Aaron’s life was weighed and measured, counted out in dollars. When I saw her again, standing in my driveway, I did not think beyond getting her off my property. And when I saw her close up, having caught her right before she hit the pavement, I did not think beyond treating her.
But now. Now I notice that she’s beautiful, her blond hair straight and cut blunt past her shoulders, her eyelashes long and dark, her top lip almost as fully plump as her bottom.
When she turns to face me, I clear my throat and speak again. “Not a real marriage. Obviously.”
“Whatever that is,” she says, an unsubtle thread of sarcasm in her voice. “Explain.”
If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t believe that this woman had, minutes ago, turned the whitest shade of pale and crumpled in my front yard. Her cheeks are pink and her posture is ramrod straight; her voice is sharp, crystal clear, every word she says articulated fully.
But I did see it myself, and at least my ridiculous proposal has provided me an opportunity for some professional peace of mind. “It’s a long story,” I say. “How about you come on in and sit down, and I’ll tell you.”
She cocks her head at me, amber eyes flashing with recognition. “I released you from all your obligations to me. I told you; I feel absolutely fine.”
“You also asked if there was anything you could do for me, and I told you there was. Was that just you blowing smoke up my ass?” Jesus, my attitude. My mother would bean me—hard—if she heard me talk to a guest like this, even if that guest is a sworn enemy of our family.
“No,” she says, and takes her hand from the door handle.
Success. I guide her back inside, snag her water from the coffee table, and walk her through to the kitchen, pulling out a chair for her at the small table in the corner. When she sits, it’s prim and proper control: back straight against the chair, legs crossed, hands folded in her lap.
“I’ll make you a sandwich,” I say, setting the water down in front of her.
“I don’t want a sandwich.”
“It’ll be peanut butter and jelly,” I say, ignoring her and pulling down a loaf of bread from off the top of the fridge.
“I said I don’t want one.”
“Are you allergic to peanut butter, jelly, or bread?”
“No.”
“Okay. Then I’m going to make you this damn sandwich.” It’s like I can feel my mother’s anger and embarrassment all the way from Florida. “You can eat it or not, but it’ll make me feel better to make it. All right?”
There’s a beat of silence, and I wonder what expression she must be leveling at my back right now. “All right.” I think there may be a thread of amusement in there, something slightly lighter than what I’ve heard in her voice up to now.
I pull the peanut butter and jelly from the fridge, grab a knife from the drawer. Now that she’s in here—now that I actually have to say out loud the insane idea that had popped into my head when she’d been preparing to walk out, I don’t know where to begin. You haven’t said anything yet, dumbass, I think. You can still take this back. But something—someone, I guess, stops me. This idea, crazy as it is, may do some good for Aaron. For the memory of Aaron, I correct myself.
“The money my family got from the settlement,” I begin, keeping my back turned to her while I spread the peanut butter, thin on each slice of bread, then jelly in between. “I’ve been left in charge of that.”
“Has something happened to your parents?” From behind me, her voice is higher, concerned.
“Other than them not wanting to deal with a payoff for my brother’s life? No.” She says nothing to this—fair enough—and I slice her sandwich in half, set it on a plate, and turn back to her. “This is a good sandwich,” I say, ridiculously. It has three fucking ingredients, and I’m acting like there’s something to sell.
I think her lips might purse in suppressed amusement. “I’ll try it. Do you have a napkin?”
A napkin? For Christ’s sake, this woman. It’s peanut butter and jelly, not lobster. I tear off a paper towel from the roll beside the sink and hand it to her. When she smooths it across her lap, I have to press the heels of my hands in my eyes, just to process the insanity of this entire situation.
“Anyways,” I say, leaning back against the counter and crossing my arms, “I’m in charge of the money. I’m looking to buy a large piece of land with it, a campground in Stanton Valley, about two hours from here.”
She takes a bite of the sandwich, small and precise, then lifts the paper towel to the corner of her mouth. I have a weird hope that some of the jelly blobs onto her chin, or dress, or something. Something so she doesn’t look so perfect sitting there. “Continue,” she says, once she’s swallowed.
“The current owners are...” I have to pause, to think about how to phrase this to get her on board. “They’re—a very traditional couple about certain things.”
“Fair Housing Act applies. They can’t choose a buyer based on religious beliefs.”
“I didn’t say it was religious beliefs,” I say, curt, frustrated more at myself than at her. The truth is, Paul and Lorraine are religious, had always incorporated a bit of their faith into the running of the camp. But it wasn’t what the camp was about. “They—they’re hoping to see the camp continue with similar traditions. They want a family-owned operation. They haven’t fully committed to a sale yet, but they know there are a few people like me who are interested. People who know the camp well.”
“This was a camp you went to?”
I nod. To say I went there feels like an understatement. I lived a good portion of my childhood summers there. Almost all my best memories of Aaron, of me and Aaron together, are at that camp. I swallow down an inconvenient wave of fresh grief.
She makes a small hum of assent. “Is this jelly homemade?” she asks, taking another bite.
“Yes,” I say, involuntarily glad on my mother’s behalf that she’s noticed. And that she’s eaten an entire half. Her color looks even better. “The Dillards have invited some of the interested parties to spend six weekends in Stanton Valley, starting next week. To see what people imagine for the future of the camp. To…” I pause, recalling Lorraine’s exact words. “To feel that they are making the choice God wants, if they decide to sell.”
She makes an unladylike snort, a sound that, weirdly, sends a shot of heat through me. When the tip of her tongue snakes out for a fraction of a second to catch a crumb in the corner of her mouth, I have to lower my eyes to stop my thoughts from going where they’re going. “And you think you have a better shot at this if you’re married?”
“I’m the only person going who doesn’t have a family.”
I can see from her thoughtful expression that she knows this would matter, my outlier status.
“What do you want to do with the campground?”
I think of the small bedroom at the back of the house, the one I’ve turned into my office. The drawer of files I’ve kept, meticulously. The whiteboard I hung on the wall to keep track of my ideas. The bookmark folders on my browser, each full with websites related to different aspects of my plan. It is months, hours upon hours of work, work I do in between my shifts, work that is challenging and sometimes goddamn painful too.
I don’t want to tell her any of this.
“That doesn’t have to be your business,” I say, and at this, I see something true in Zoe Ferris, something beneath the placid demeanor she’s worn like a piece of clothing since she got out of that car. I see a fire in her—an eyebrow arch, sharp and eviscerating, a tightening at the corners of her mouth, tiny parentheses enclosing everything she’s not saying. If I could set a hand on her, I think, I’d feel that all her muscles have gone tight.
But it’s gone in a flash. She’s collected herself, distant again. “I’m assuming they’re not stupid?”
I cock my head at her, a wordless inquisition.
“Because if you know these people, even casually, they’ll wonder why you’re showing up with a wife they’ve never heard of. Better if I’m a fiancée. It might be helpful, actually. Lots of—I don’t know. Promise for the future, or something.” She calmly takes another bite of the sandwich, then sets it down on the plate and wipes her mouth again, folding the paper towel and setting it on the table before clasping her hands again and looking back up at me. Everything she does is careful and exact. I am standing, looking down at her, using her guilt to get something I want. But somehow nothing about this interaction suggests I’m in control.
“That makes sense,” I say.
“It doesn’t bother you that you’ll be lying? Lying to good people?”
Yeah. Yeah, it does bother me. But this idea—it has so much potential, so much opportunity to do good, to make that money feel less like it’s coated in my brother’s blood. And I have to believe that Lorraine and Paul will see this, once they get to know the idea. I just need a way in. “Did it ever bother you?” I ask, and watch her face transform, mask-like and frozen. I expect her to say that she never lied. That she did her job within the law, that her particular role had nothing to do with whatever deceptions the makers of Opryxa had perpetrated.
“It did,” she says, simply. She’s looked right at me to say it, and there’s something about it—that fire in her eyes set against that flat tone in her voice—that thuds right into my chest, makes me vibrate, for a split second, with a curiosity I haven’t felt about anything in months and months.
I look down at my feet, break the connection, clear my throat. “I want in the door. I want an opportunity to show them what I can do with the camp. Once they hear me—once they agree to sell to me—we move on from this. We have an amicable breakup, whatever. It doesn’t have to be dramatic.”
“You’re that confident in your idea?”
“I am.” This is maybe half-true. I’m confident as hell in the idea. I’m less confident in my personal abilities to pull it off.
“Why me?” she asks.
What I want to say is, I have no fucking idea. I want to say that this morning has gone in an entirely unexpected direction and that I’m sure I will spend the rest of the day kicking my own ass over it. But now that we’ve come this far, now that we’ve actually talked about it, I can see her there. Not, obviously, in the dress and heels. But I can see—despite the fainting, which really does seem like a one-off—how she’d be composed and unflappable in such odd circumstances. Hell, I can see how she’d be better at it than I’ll be.
She’s waiting for my answer. She’s hardly moved in that chair, not even a fidget or toss of her hair. “Because you’re here, and because you said you’d do anything to make up for what happened. And because you seem like you’d do well at deception.”
Somewhere inside, I feel the answering pang at saying this—I said it for no other reason than to hurt her. It’s small, petty, cruel. I want to believe that’s not who I am, but who am I except for the shit that I say and do? I’m surprised, all over again, by how angry I still am and how much I still let it show. If she says no now, I don’t have anyone to blame but myself.
She stands from her chair. This close, the short length of the kitchen separating us, I notice how tall she is. In her heels, she’s only a few inches shorter than me, and the way she holds herself—she owns every bit of that height. I think she’s about to give me the dressing-down of my life, even worse than whatever my mother would say to me about the way I’ve acted.
But instead she says, “Fine. I’ll do it.” I open my mouth to respond, to give her details, but she holds up a hand and stops me. “You need to know that when I leave here, I’m going to call the investigator from my former firm and have him run a background check on you. If that’s a problem, tell me now, and we don’t do this.”
“It’s not a problem,” I tell her, honestly. She’s thinking of shit I should’ve thought of, if I hadn’t come up with this idea in literally a half second.
“I’ll leave you with my cell phone, address and my email, but I’d prefer we correspond by email for the time being. You can send me details about the camp, including where exactly it is located, and what exact time we’ll be leaving and returning. You’ll need to give me your contact information too, because I’ll be sharing that with—with people who know me.”
“Fine.”
“And you can tell me—you can write to me about who you want me to be for this.”
“Who I want—”
She speaks over me, again, not acknowledging the way I struggle to keep up with her. “Obviously you know this family, and I don’t. If you feel that there are characteristics I should have in their presence, you can tell me about that, and I’ll do my best. I would say, in general, that while I’ve traveled a lot, I’m not much of a camping person, so you may want to bear that in mind. I probably can be charming enough as a fish out of water.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say. “Have you done this before?”
She gives me another one of those looks, one of the ones that could slice me right in half, and says nothing. I turn and open a drawer, pull out a notepad and pen, and extend it to her. I look away when she bends over the table to write; somehow I know it would be colossally stupid for me to see that view. I listen while the pen scratches across the page, and I have a strange thought: I’ve seen her handwriting before. I know she writes the Z of her name so that it looks like a number three. I’ve seen her signature on countless documents, all related to my brother’s death.
But then it’s done—she leaves the notepad and pen on the table and turns to look at me, and for a minute we’re quiet, probably the shock of what we’ve agreed to. It’s no conference room. But I have the sense, somehow, that like my parents before me, I’ve just finalized a contract with Zoe Ferris.
* * * *
“It’s fucking insane, is what it is!” Ahmed shouts this from across the table, his mouth half-full of a turkey and cheddar sub, the only order he ever places at Dicky’s, our usual takeout run when we’ve got long enough for breaks. It’s Thursday night, and we’re in the kitchenette of the squad’s living quarters, shoving food in our faces as fast as it will go, knowing that we’ll probably start getting calls any minute—the college crowd tends to get rowdy on Thursday nights—and I have just made my second major mistake of the week, telling Ahmed about Zoe Ferris.
“Quiet, man,” I say back, jerking a thumb over my shoulder toward the next room, where two cots, a worn-out sofa, and a tube TV on stacked milk crates are set up. “Charlie’s sleeping.”
“I don’t fucking care! Charlie!” he shouts, spraying a few breadcrumbs in his haste. “Get in here and hear what this bag of hammers has done.”
I reach a fist out and punch him hard in the shoulder, but he barely flinches. I’m a big guy, but Ahmed is massive, a relic he’s kept from the two years he played semipro as a linebacker.
Charlie—the third member of our crew, the driver—stumbles in, tying her hair back into a ponytail while glaring daggers at Ahmed. “This better be good, asshole. I was having a dream about Lucy Liu.”
“Got you a sub, Charlie,” I say, nodding toward the fridge, and she squeezes my shoulder in appreciation on her way to get it.
“Like a sex dream?” Ahmed says, forgetting about me and my personal crisis for a moment.
Charlie rolls her eyes my way, commiserating. I joined this crew six months ago, right after I’d moved back home—only a few weeks before my parents decamped to Florida, and that was on purpose too, another way for me to hide from the worst of their grief and another way for me to hide my own. I’d been with my last crew in Colorado for almost five years, and we’d had the kind of shorthand forged only through time and the stress of constant emergencies. I’d expected to come here, do a job, keep as much of my focus as possible on my side project with the camp, and entirely avoid emotional interactions of any kind, since all my insides still, over a year after Aaron’s death, felt like shards of glass. But Charlie and Ahmed are hard to ignore, big personalities who seem wholly unconcerned with whatever sharp replies or brushoffs I’ve handed out, and already we’ve worked out a preliminary shorthand of our own, Charlie and me the straight-faced, secretly amused maturity to Ahmed’s mostly-sixteen-year-old sensibilities.
“No,” Charlie says, settling into her chair and unwrapping her sub. “We were solving crimes together.”
Ahmed stares. “Is that a metaphor?”
“Oh my God. No. What did you wake me up for?”
At this, Ahmed gets his feet back. “Aiden’s asked some woman to be his fake fiancée for this camp thing.”
The fact that Ahmed refers to the biggest project of my adult life as this camp thing is further evidence of the limits to our bond. If it’d been possible, I wouldn’t have told Charlie or Ahmed about Stanton Valley, but since I’m relying on their help with coverage for the next month and a half, they had to know something, and for now I’ve settled for telling them about the real estate, not my plans for it. Charlie hadn’t been keen to let that lie, either—she grew up on a farm not far from Stanton Valley, knows land out there doesn’t come cheap—and so I’d also fessed up to the bare minimum about the money: my brother had died, and my family had received wrongful death and survival damages from the pharmaceutical company responsible.
That had been awkward enough to keep them from asking much more. Until, of course, I’d mentioned Zoe.
Charlie swallows, sets down her sub. “This does sound dumb,” she says, grudgingly, and Ahmed smiles in satisfaction.
“It’s not how it sounds,” I say, my neck hot. But of course, it is exactly how it sounds, and they don’t even know the half of it. I tell Charlie about the Dillards, tell her about the disadvantage I’m at, up against three other families.
“Man, Aid. When you go all in…”
“It’s important,” I say.
“How’d you meet this woman?”
“She’s a friend of the family,” I say, an appalling, offensive lie. One morning and maybe she’s rubbed off on me; maybe by the end of this thing I’ll be as deceitful as she is.
“It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” says Charlie, and Ahmed groans, slapping a hand to his forehead.
“Aww, Charlie. Don’t encourage this.”
She picks up her sub again, takes a bite, and chews. Charlie’s a thinker, a problem solver, and dear God I wish Ahmed hadn’t called her in here. I wish I hadn’t mentioned any damn thing about Zoe. “What’s she like?”
Confusing, I want to say. Weak enough to faint in one moment, strong enough to stand up to me the next. Scary enough for me to want her to leave, intriguing enough for me to ask her to stay. Cold, hot.
“Convenient,” I say. “Available. Willing.”
Ahmed snorts, and Charlie narrows her eyes. “You’re going to have to do better than that if you want to convince anyone of this thing. You’ve got a look on your face like indigestion’s coming on.”
“Maybe the sub,” I say.
“I’m serious,” she says. “You want people to think you’re engaged to her, you’re probably going to have to break your three-words-or-less-per-sentence rule and actually talk.”
“I’ll work it out.”
“That was four words,” says Ahmed.
“If she’s a friend of your family, you’ve got to know something more about her. What about your parents, are they close to her?”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. “Not really,” I say, and Ahmed holds up two fingers.
The truth is, I’d only really thought of how this thing would work in terms of my parents after Zoe had driven off. They know about the camp, know about how I’ll be spending time out there, making my case to the Dillards. But there’s no way I can tell them this, and so I’m going to be a liar twice over, at least. I tell myself it won’t matter; they’ve pretty much cocooned themselves down there in Florida, my dad not really fit for keeping in touch with friends back home, and my mom preoccupied with him and with the ten thousand hobbies she’s buried herself in to get over Aaron. I doubt they’d ever find out, but just to be safe, I’ll think of something. I’ll tell them it’ll make it easier for me to stay on message, present a coherent package to Paul and Lorraine, if they stay well out of it.
“Do you see what I mean, Charlie?” Ahmed says, balling up his wrapper and tossing it into the trash. “He can’t pull something like this off.”
I keep my head down and concentrate on finishing off my food, feeling both of them stare at me, waiting for me to protest. But I’m not going to. They’re both right—it isn’t the worst idea, nor is it something I’m likely to pull off.
When I stand from my seat, clearing my trash and theirs, I catch Charlie nudging Ahmed’s elbow. No doubt they’re doing their own silent commiseration now—I’m the odd one out, again, as it should be. As much as Charlie and Ahmed rag on each other, there’s genuine affection there, the kind where they know details about each other’s families and occasionally hang out outside of work, and that’s the kind of shit I am still, and probably forever, avoiding. It’s clear that I’m rattled by what happened with Zoe, or else I never would’ve opened my fucking mouth in the first place, a thoughtless response to Ahmed’s endless questions about the camp, about whether I was ready for next weekend.
“I’m going to check the rig,” I say, not looking back at them as I head into the bay. There’s nothing to check, not really—when we came on duty we did all our procedures—but I need some space. I climb into the back of the ambulance, pull the eTablet down from its tray, and open up inventory lists—the kind of mindless task that seems good for me right now. I’m counting syringes, pads of gauze, bags of saline, whatever, losing myself in the work. But I’m not as lost as I want to be, not so distracted that I’m not still thinking of her, and everything that’s brought her into my life. Your family went through something terrible, she’d said, and I’d felt a new wave of frustration at that. As one of the lawyers who’d worked on behalf of Opryxa, she knows it all, the whole terrible story: my brother, an opioid addict since he was twenty, not long after he got prescribed prescription painkillers after a minor car crash. My brother, in and out of rehab since he was twenty-three, long, expensive stays that had bankrupted my parents twice, had prevented me from ever getting to more than a thousand bucks in savings. My brother, prescribed another drug, one that would help him kick the habit.
A drug that killed him at the age of twenty-nine.
I’d read every single correspondence from Willis-Hanawalt. I knew what they’d argued about my brother. I knew the carefully phrased liabilities they’d acknowledged when proposing settlements. I knew the ugly digging they’d done about his past, the way they’d made it seem like Aaron was likely to die anyway, was always an unlikely candidate for success in pharmaceutical treatment of addiction. I knew now how hard they’d worked to settle individual cases, to prevent class action suits. To bury the extent of Opryxa’s risk factors. I knew that my parents had agreed, once they took the settlement, to release them of all liability.
I’d seen her name on all that correspondence, and it gives her a strange, uncomfortable power over me, all she knows about my family. I don’t know whether she’s made the worst, most painful connection between Aaron and me, and I don’t know whether I want to know. But it’s Aaron I have to keep in my mind here, Aaron who’s at the front. Aaron who I’m doing all this for, and I’ll do anything. It’s the attitude I should’ve had when he was still alive, and it’s the attitude that’ll make it possible for me to do what I have to do with Zoe Ferris, to pretend to be in love with her.
And there it is, the alarm letting us know we’ve got a call in, and I can already hear Charlie and Ahmed hustling out to the bay.
I try not to take it as an omen.