Chapter 7
Zoe
If this were a regular Sunday, I’d likely be sitting in one of four restaurants. Maybe The Outcast Diner, Kit’s favorite, even though I think the tables can be a tad sticky. Maybe Lula’s, also a diner, but with a bit less character and a lot more polish, catering to an upscale, professional crowd. It could also be this tiny bakery on Third, Greer’s pick, which serves the best Belgian waffles in town, but we always have to eat fast because there are barely any seats and people really start working their stink-eyes on you if you linger over your coffee. If it were a regular Sunday but we were feeling fancy, maybe we’d go to the Crestwood; we’d drink mimosas and eat too many of the sweet biscuits they bring, the ones that have a powdered-sugar C on top.
If it were a regular Sunday, I wouldn’t have a small serving of scrambled eggs and toast sitting in my stomach like lead. I wouldn’t be listening to Rachel pelt Val with questions about her presentation, every single one of them a master class in subtle antifeminism. (But do you worry about whether these girls would then have a hard time adjusting to the competition they’d face in their schools?) I wouldn’t be working so determinedly to keep from looking over my shoulder every two minutes to see whether Aiden will show up, wouldn’t be worrying about whether Lorraine can see the tense set of my shoulders, the circles under my eyes from a mostly sleepless night, me lying awake in my bunk, the ceiling two feet from my face, waiting up to see if Aiden might say something.
He didn’t.
If it were a regular Sunday, I’d be unloading to Kit and Greer. Twins, I’d say. How could I miss it? I’d once known the Aaron O’Leary file so well. I’d known his birthdate. And I’d seen Aiden’s a couple of weeks ago on the background check. You should have seen his face, I’d tell them, remembering the way Aiden looked down at that little girl, his shoulders actually recoiling, a little, in shock.
But no—if it were a regular Sunday, I wouldn’t be talking about Aiden at all. I wouldn’t know Aiden at all. I’d be doing what I’ve been doing for every brunch I’ve had since I quit my job. I’d be deflecting, talking to Kit about her house, or asking Greer about classes, or making a joke about my endless dating dry spell, even though I’m pretty sure all three of us know I’ve cast that particular spell myself. I straighten in my seat, drag myself back to attention. I have to be here. I have to be doing this, for Aiden and for myself.
“Well, I homeschool my girls,” Rachel is saying. “And they don’t seem naturally inclined to—”
Please don’t say math or science, I’m thinking, but when Val laughs I realize I’ve said it out loud. “Sorry,” I blurt. “I was—conversation interrupting. Ignore me.”
“No, no,” says Lorraine. “I’m glad you did. We shouldn’t be talking about this, not now. Let’s just enjoy each other’s company!”
There’s a beat of awkward silence, probably all of us understanding the truth of this moment, which is that right now we don’t have all that much in common except for this camp. Hammond and Walt have taken the kids outside the lodge to play, to burn off energy before their drives home, and Sheree and Tom left early this morning, Little Tommy crying and tugging on his left ear, his nose runny. Paul gave the kitchen staff the morning off, so he’s been doing the cooking. As for Aiden? He’d said he’d be right behind me, but there’s been no sign of him yet.
“Zoe, I am sorry about last night,” says Val, that saccharine quality back in her voice this morning, and it’s disappointing, really, because I’d liked the badass, take-no-prisoners Val who went up to the front of this very room and talked about girl power. “I caught the tail end of what Hannah said to Aiden. You know how kids are. I’m sure you have nieces and nephews.”
I ignore that, because I see Hammond and Val are still exploiting Aiden’s and my outsider status on this point as part of their strategy. “Oh, there’s nothing to be sorry for,” I say, but it comes out a little sharper than I intend. How come I can’t get my voice to do that thing Val’s does? Maybe if I suck on one of these sugar packets.
“I hope I didn’t make a mistake in telling Hannah and Olivia about Aiden,” says Lorraine, pulling our empty plates toward her and stacking them. “I know Aiden is still in a lot of pain about Aaron,” she says. Val shakes her head and does this tongue-clucking thing, sympathy straight out of central casting, and Rachel nods along with her. It’s clear that our quick exit last night was a topic of conversation, and I feel a spike of desperation. Stable and happy, Aiden had said, back at Betty’s. This is exactly what he doesn’t want, everyone thinking about his grief and how messed up he still is over it.
“He is in a lot of pain,” I say, because it’d be ridiculous to try to account for last night—that look on his face—by saying something else. I take a sip of my coffee and steel myself, because I’m about to lie half my own face right off. “But I think he needed some time with me, to—you know. Get centered again. Aiden and I—we sort of bonded early on about…” I have to pause here, swallow a lump in my throat. “About loss. We support each other.” As soon as I say it, I realize the half lie is as painful as the truth. What would it have been like, all those years ago, to have had someone who understood loss, someone I could lean on and build up, all at the same time? I’d looked for it, thought I’d found it once, but of course it’d been a mistake, a huge mistake that had made everything worse. By the time I’d found Kit and Greer, the kind of friends that keep caring about you even when you’re a total mess, I’d buried it all. I’d made myself strong enough, became my own support.
“Did you lose a sibling too?” asks Lorraine, her voice gentle.
“No. I lost my dad. But he was—we were really close,” I manage, wishing now I hadn’t gone down this path, wishing I hadn’t given up something of myself to help Aiden, who can’t even be bothered to show up to this fucking thing, who’s never going to get this camp unless he starts doing better. Beside me, Rachel takes a noisy sip of her orange juice, and I think about asking whether table manners are a part of that homeschooling syllabus.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” says Lorraine. “It’s good that you have Aiden, and that Aiden has you. Has he told you much about Aaron?”
“Oh—well. Yes, sure. Of course.” Because saying it three different ways is maximum convincing, obviously. But now that I’ve brought up my dad, I feel nervous, halfway to panic. I can recite twenty different facts about Aaron O’Leary, but they’re all the wrong ones. They don’t have anything to do with why Aiden looked at that little girl like he did.
I’m saved by the sound of delighted, giggling shrieks from outside. Val stands, her hands going immediately to her hips. “If Hammond gave them candy bars, I’m going to be furious.”
“Our kids don’t eat sugar,” says Rachel.
“Yes, you’ve mentioned that,” snaps Val, and Lorraine and I exchange a look—a friendly commiseration that makes me feel as close to her as I’ve been since I’ve met her.
We all head to the lodge’s door, file out onto the porch to see what the commotion is, and wouldn’t you know it, Aiden’s shown up after all. He’s pushing Hannah and Olivia in a swing made from one of the tires I’d spray-painted yesterday—I’ve still got bright yellow paint underneath my fingernails as a reminder. The younger Coburg kids are restless around him, waiting for their turn, and when he looks up and notices us all watching, he offers a sheepish nod in our direction.
“He must’ve dragged that all the way from the obstacle course,” Lorraine says.
“I hope neither of them throws up,” says Val.
I’m hot in the face, at least three too many emotions to deal with all at once: I’m relieved to be out of that dining hall, out of that conversation. I’m grateful he’s shown up. I’m a little proud, too, not that I have any right to be, and not that he’d ever talk to me again if I actually said that. Frankly I’m also really appreciating the way he looks in that thermal and those worn jeans, though I don’t know if that’s a feeling I should be contemplating in the presence of small children.
He turns and motions to Hammond, who helps the girls off the tire swing so that a couple of the Coburg kids can hop on, and Walt takes over the pushing. We meet in the middle, me and Aiden, slightly apart from the group. I don’t want to make too much of it, but I’m suddenly afraid something about that conversation I just had will blow up in my face if I don’t keep Aiden in the loop. We can’t afford to get our stories crossed. “Nice job,” I say, nodding toward the tire swing and sliding my arm around his waist and looking up at him. When he picks me up for these weekends, his jaw is clean shaven; by Sunday it’s shadowed with dark hair. I like it better this way, not that I’m entitled to have a preference. I offer up a quiet cough, a clearing of my throat, and he takes the hint and drapes an arm across my shoulders. This fake affection—it’s so new. Strangely electric and familiar, all at the same time. My hand on his knee last night had felt like the first time I held a boy’s hand.
From here, I can push up slightly on my tiptoes, get close to his ear. He smells like Irish Spring, the bar of soap he has in our cabin shower next to my bottle of body wash. If he stiffens a little at my nearness, I try not to let it hurt my feelings. “Just so you know,” I say, trying to keep my voice light, level. “I told Lorraine and Val and Rachel that you and I—well. I told them my father died. That you and I have something in common, I meant.” Around my shoulders, his arm tightens a fraction. If I weren’t so aware of him, I might not even notice. “I know it’s not the same, obviously,” I add, quickly. “But everyone was sort of making a thing about how we left last night, and I was trying to…”
“Is that true?” Standing this close to him I can feel that low voice rumble against me. I feel it all the way to my toes, and that’s saying something, because I’m pretty sure these boots are a half size too small.
“You said you didn’t want everyone focusing on your grief,” I say, a deliberate dodge. I know what he’s thinking, but I don’t want to know. I don’t want to confront this again, this distrust he has for me. It’d seemed, over the last day, that things were getting better. That he saw me differently.
But he says it anyway. “I mean about your father. Is that true?”
There’s a nasty part of me that wants to confirm all his worst suspicions. No, it’s not true. I just have no shame, no shame at all. But, of course, I do have shame, shame and guilt and all the rest of it, and I’d never lie about this. “Yes,” I say.
He looks down at me, a moment that feels as if it stretches forever. I’d like to say there’s some sympathy in the hard planes of his face. But mostly it’s a look I’m well accustomed to from Aiden, though not so up close. It’s half assessment, half how-the-fuck-did-I-wind-up-with-her.
I shrug—an answer to that unspoken question, and a rejection of that arm around me. “Anyways,” I say. “Problem solved.”
* * * *
The thing about keeping your guilt jar—or your guilt vase, whatever—right there in the center of your dining room table is that you don’t give yourself all that much time to forget about it. When I get home from the campground on Sunday, it’s the first thing my eyes land on, and I’m tempted to pick the thing up and throw it right in the trash. So what if I’ve made friends with Janet, if I made terrible cookies with her one awkward weeknight? So what if I’ve got a meeting with Dan—the crying paralegal—to help him with his law school application on Tuesday evening? So what if I’m customer of the week at Starbucks; so what if I park way in the back row of the parking lot of the grocery store now?
I shouldn’t have brought up my dad, that’s the thing. So much went wrong after my dad died. So many of my mistakes seem to be Hydra heads from that one crushing event, and mentioning it to Aiden—and the tense moment of confrontation and confirmation that followed—seemed to set off a fresh wave of rumination. The whole drive home I was quiet and sullen, a role reversal that might have delighted me if I could have appreciated the way Aiden had become increasingly restless, uncomfortable with my silence. He’d even put on the radio. “It’s that song you like,” he’d said, when the obnoxious electronic beat filled the interior. “I don’t like it,” I’d snapped back, guaranteeing that he’d back off for the rest of the drive.
I let my pack thunk onto the floor of the foyer. Probably I should take it straight to the bedroom, start on my laundry right away, check for ticks in every seam. Instead I tug off my boots and head to the table, slumping into one of the chairs. I reach my hand into the vase, pull out my stiff slips of paper until I find the one I’m looking for.
It’s not like my dad is in the guilt jar because I’m responsible for his death. No, that honor goes to the massive heart attack he had at home, while he was brushing his teeth one Tuesday night. Sudden, of course, but it shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. He was seventy-one years old, after all, had lived a lot of his first fifty years—before he met a pretty, twenty-five-year-old blonde and settled down—fast and unhealthy, drinking gin and smoking fat cigars and working eighty-hour weeks at his firm in L.A.
And he’s not in the guilt jar because I’d disappointed him or been cruel to him when he was alive. At his funeral, dumbstruck and wobbly in a pair of my mother’s heels, I’d tried to think of something, anything, unpleasant that had happened between us. Had we never had a fight? Had he never said something casually unkind, something dismissive or flippant about my childhood interests? Had I never talked back to him, given him normal teenage grief about rules or curfews? If I could only think of something, I’d told myself, the whole thing would hurt less. I’d cling to that unpleasantness, use it as a bandage for the great, sucking hole that seemed to live in my stomach since my mother had called me, my cell phone trilling loud in my quiet dorm room, barely fifteen miles from home, to tell me he was already gone.
But there hadn’t been anything like that, no cruelty or fighting or petty annoyances. From the beginning, he’d been my hero, and I’d been his miracle kid, coming into his life well after he’d resolved to be a lifelong bachelor. When I was six he retired; he picked me up from school every day, took me to tennis lessons at our country club, helped me with my homework. Before I went to bed at night he’d give me an article he’d cut out from that day’s paper—usually an editorial, something about politics or foreign policy—and then in the morning, while we ate breakfast he had made, he’d pepper me with questions about it, about how I’d answer this point or that. He’d laugh at my precocious answers. He’d tell my mom, who was hardly ever paying attention: Look at us, having breakfast with one of the greatest legal minds in this country!
Dad’s in the guilt jar because I did everything wrong after he died. I barely managed to finish out the spring at USC, pulled Cs only because there’d been four weeks left in the semester and I’d done so well prior. I spent the summer in bars all over L.A., drunk and reckless, until I’d met Christopher, and after that I’d been sober, but still reckless. I was cruel to my mother—I hated her for barely shedding a tear, told her she’d always been jealous of me and Dad, that everyone knew she’d married him for his money. It wasn’t that those things were entirely untrue. She was jealous. She had married him, at least in part, for his money, or at least she hadn’t married him for better or for worse. As he got older, his hair getting thinner and his middle getting thicker, I’d sometimes catch her looking at him with a slight sneer of disgust. At the club, her affair with one of the golf pros was an open secret.
But my dad had loved her, I think, or had at least wanted to take care of her. He would’ve hated the way I treated her, how petty and small I became, how angry and stupid. He would have hated the way I fell apart. He would have been so disappointed. Sure, I’d cleaned up my act, ended it with Christopher after only a few months, a costly disentanglement that had seemed to sever any chance at reconciliation my mother and I might have had.
I’d gone back to USC, finished with honors. I’d even gotten that law degree, had moved all the way across the country just so I could go to his alma mater. I’d tried, like I’m trying now, to correct my mistakes.
But I still don’t think I’ve done right by him. Don’t think I’m the person he would’ve wanted me to be. For one thing, he wouldn’t have wanted me to be the kind of person to have enough sins to make an actual receptacle for them. He wouldn’t have wanted me to win the lottery, either—he’d come from nothing, a broken home and college on the GI Bill, a legendary work ethic that kept him doing pro bono cases even after he retired. Work, he used to say to me, is what gives our lives meaning. When I was still at the firm, when I’d come home from the office at ten o’clock at night, barely awake enough to kick off my stilettos and flop backward onto my bed, I’d sometimes just lie there, staring at the ceiling, an ache in my middle that I’d known was the particular, lingering feeling of grief. Is this what my life is supposed to mean, Dad? I’d think. Is it like this, money and contracts and arranging words in precisely the right way?
I use the tip of my index finger to push the square of paper aimlessly across the table, suddenly so lonely that I feel my eyes well up. It’s a funny thing about the campground: I haven’t felt lonely there, not really. Even in the cabin at night, when Aiden and I choreograph our strange nighttime routine—him out on that stoop until I say, me turning onto my side to face the wall when he changes for bed—I feel some thread of connection to him, a mutual awkwardness I know we’re both thinking about in that musty cabin. I should call Kit and Greer. Kit especially would get a kick out of my recounting Rachel’s math-and-science bit.
I hear the muffled ring of my phone from my pack, and I smile in spite of myself. It’s one of them—I’m sure of it. This is how it works with us, a connection that’s only grown stronger in the months since our lives changed so drastically, since that damned lucky ticket rewrote our stories for us.
But when I pull my phone from the side pocket, it’s not either of their names on the display.
It’s Aiden’s.
“Hello?” I answer, my voice tentative. I worry there’s a sound of tears in my voice, but it’s not like he’d notice. It’s not like he’d care.
“Hey.” On the phone, his voice sounds even deeper, too close to my ear. I can hear the scratch of his stubble across the phone’s speaker, as if he’s adjusting it against his face. I’ve never seen him use his cell phone—I’m not even sure he carries it with him all the time, a strange quirk these days that makes it seem as if he’s from a different time.
“How are you?” I say, because he doesn’t make another volley after his hey, and someone here has to follow adult rules of communication.
“About the same as I was fifteen minutes ago.”
“You called me,” I say, annoyed, but at least I don’t feel like crying anymore. “Don’t keep me. I have to go look at all my clothes and make sure there aren’t bloodsucking bugs making a home in them.”
I think the sound he makes is a chuckle, but I long to see it in person. He’s so stern, Aiden. Every time I get even a whisper of amusement out of him, I feel weirdly self-satisfied.
“Wanted to call and say something.” It’s so quick that some of the words run together.
“If it’s about how Hammond called Val babykins after breakfast, let’s leave it. I think one of my teeth fell out when I heard it.”
“I wanted to say I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Oh,” I manage. No chance of verbal sparring after this. My throat feels closed and tense, my eyes scratchy with unshed tears.
“Didn’t say anything before, which was a dick move. So I’m sorry. That it happened, and that I didn’t say anything.”
“It’s fine.”
Another stretch of silence, a car door slamming. I tamp down a ridiculous sense of disappointment. Of course we’re not going to talk about it. He’s just doing the right thing; Aiden’s the kind of guy who does the right thing. But he isn’t the kind of guy who wants to know more than he has to, at least when it comes to me. At Betty’s, he’d said he was trying to be better friends with Ahmed and Charlie, and I wonder what that’d be like, Aiden as a friend. I don’t suppose he’d ever be like me, too chatty by half, too loud sometimes, overeager to get a laugh. Relentless.
“It is awful how he called her that,” Aiden finally says. “Hammond, I mean. I’m pretty sure they’re insulting each other with those names.”
I feel a smile hook at the corners of my lips, a smile that felt impossible when I first walked into this room, not even a half hour ago. “They totally are.” I keep the snark in my voice, not overselling it. I’ll bet this is what Aiden’s like, as a friend, or at least for a second I let myself believe it. Quiet, but he tries. Doesn’t leave you hanging, not when it really matters.
“Well. I’d better get going. Got a shift tonight.”
“Okay.” Then I add, without thinking, “Be careful.”
A hot flush spreads up my neck, underneath my ears. I’ve said that as though he’s my fiancé for real, as though I have something to do with his life outside the weekends in Stanton Valley. I’m so embarrassed that I move the phone away from my ear to hang up.
But not before I catch him say, maybe more gently than usual, “Sure. Thanks.”
I look down at where my pack rests by my feet, see the hard shape of Aiden’s binder pressing against its back side. In my hand, my phone pings with a text, an expected one this time, in our long-running group message. Back yet? Kit’s written, and I type out a quick reply: All in one piece.
She’ll want more—she and Greer both will. Right now, though, I don’t so much feel like giving it up. I feel like having Aiden’s voice as the last in my ear. I type out another quick text to my friends, my friends who so clearly disapprove of what I’ve chosen to do with my weekends. I’ll call you guys later. Need to shower and start laundry.
But instead I bend down, unzip my pack and slide out the binder, take it over to the dining room table, and open it again. It’s hard, looking at this and thinking about how to make it work—this story of addiction, lives lost and ruined or never really the same, even if they come out the other side—after seeing Val’s smiling, healthy girls, all that potential for them in Paul and Lorraine’s campground.
It’s hard seeing Dad’s slip lying there on the table beside the vase.
It’s hard—but it’s what I deserve.