Twice Shy

by Sarah Hogle

  Strips of black-spotted plaster hang from ceilings. The walls peel. Strange, dark shapes rise all the way up to the chandeliers. Falling Stars has been consumed by disease, more like Sleeping Beauty’s castle after the curse took hold. The house isn’t even pink anymore: it’s silver gossamer.

  I exhale a sharp denial. “No.” Violet took such amazing care of her house—daily dusting, vacuuming, mopping. Never a burned-out lightbulb left sitting in a fixture, never a book put away crookedly in the library. Beds were made as soon as you woke up, plates were washed right after you ate off them, and you folded your clothes when they were still warm from the dryer. This estate was her pride and joy. She ran it like a queen.

  My attention is drawn to two squares of light tucked into nearby trees. Windows. And attached to them, a triangular cabin. It used to be Uncle Victor’s work shed, but when I went exploring as a kid all I found inside was a hot, dark mess of rusted farm equipment and spiderwebs. Now the lights are on and somebody’s pickup truck is parked outside.

  I make my way over cautiously, the path rough and uneven where tree roots have ripped up asphalt, nature reclaiming its territory. I mentally skim through everything I know about squatter’s rights as I approach, car keys poking from my balled fist like Wolverine’s claws. The pickup truck isn’t the only unexpected company here: on its other side sits a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, just like the one Ruth Campos climbed into as we said our goodbyes.

  The same Ruth who’s swinging the front door open to greet me.

  “Maybell! Wonderful, you’re right on time.”

  “Right on time for what?”

  She answers my question with a question. “How was the trip?”

  Is it me, or does she seem nervous? “I just saw the house. It’s bad. It’s real bad. I didn’t expect to see you here . . .”

  I peer around her, grabbing a fleeting glimpse of a rosy, low-lit living room that contains no rusted farm equipment or spiderwebs. Instead, I find a plaid couch and a table lamp with mustangs galloping around the shade. Split-log walls. Bluish light flickers at random intervals, a television glowing somewhere within.

  “Who’s out there?” a different, deeper voice inquires. I straighten.

  A man abruptly fills the frame, blocking my view. I stumble and his hand shoots out on reflex, as though to help me, but I’m already backing up.

  A man, and not just any man. The man. In my deepest, darkest dreams, still the only man.

  He is tall, broad shouldered, strong jawed. Dark blond hair falls in short, tousled waves that make me think of a fallen angel who almost drowned, thrust out of the sea by Poseidon and made alive again with a lightning strike. His eyes are brown topaz, a glass of root beer held up to the light, widening as he fixates on my face. Every thought that’s ever swept into my head in the thirty years I’ve been alive blows away. There is dust in my throat, my eyes, my ears.

  The windstorm inside me shrieks and pulls and shakes its head no. Impossible.

  Impossibilities are all coming true today. It’s Jack McBride.

  Chapter 3

  WHO’S THIS?”

  The impossible Jack McBride is irritated by my sudden presence as Ruth beckons me inside and, in my haze, I actually obey. No, the impossible Jack McBride is angered by my presence. I’m not exactly on an even keel, either. I can’t stop gaping at him. If I don’t pass out at his feet it’ll be a miracle.

  “You exist,” I croak, too quietly to be overheard. Or at least, I think so—my grasp of volume is rolling down a hill along with my vision, good sense, self-control, everything I thought I knew about life, etc., etc.

  “This is Maybell Parrish, Violet’s great-niece,” Ruth tells him. “Julie’s girl.” Her voice is sugary, like I’m a used car she’s trying to sell. “And she’s a sweetheart, so be nice.” She picks up my limp hand, waving it hello at him. “And this is Wesley Koehler, Violet’s groundskeeper.”

  Wesley Koehler.

  Wesley Koehler, Wesley Koehler, Wesley Koehler. It’s a foreign language. It’s inconceivable. He doesn’t look like a Wesley Koehler at all—he looks like a Jack McBride: deeply romantic, musically inclined, with a keen interest in real estate. Charismatic, charming. Avid traveler, surfer, and environmental activist. Has a real way with the ladies.

  There’s no such thing as a Jack McBride, I remind myself.

  But!

  I open my mouth, a bag of wind popping inside it to let out a deflated Eeeeeeeeeeeeehhh. He frowns, which I can’t blame him for. The expression on my face right now must be a trip. I want to do a thing people only do in movies and wipe off my glasses on my shirt, then put them back on to see if I’ve been looking at an illusion.

  “My goodness, you’re shocked,” Ruth remarks. “I know you weren’t expecting anyone. I’m sorry to spring this on both of you.”

  Jack—no, Wesley—turns sharply to face her. “Spring what?”

  Ruth casts around the room for something to distract her. She centers a teacup on a coaster with life-and-death precision. “Hm?”

  “Spring what?” he repeats, now with an edge. He’s even taller than I imagined, so solid and intimidating. I’m struck by the shadow he throws upon the wall, spanning from floor to ceiling, hard jaw in black profile. I’m struck by gentle modifications to the image that appears in my head whenever I pull up his name: His hair’s a couple inches longer than it was in his pictures, and messier. There are four tiny acne scars scattered along the right side of his face, and the lamplight traces his features in a way that changes the shape of his mouth, the line of his nose. It’s wrong. And lovely. And strange. There’s a freckle an inch to the left of his Adam’s apple. The fact that I am now privy to this knowledge, that he is a real man and I am in a room with him and I know about a freckle I could not have previously fathomed . . .

  My brain is so thrown by these deviations from that memorized image that I keep shutting down every other second. It’s not him, but it’s him, but it isn’t, and yet it is. The image is crumbling, being replaced with real-time observations. The Matrix glitches, vertical strands of green code raining down on either side of him. I’m dying, maybe?

  “Ruth.”

  I flinch. His voice is lower, the rumble of gravel crunching under a heavy boot, prickling all the microscopic hairs in my inner ear. I am dying, definitely.

  Ruth presses her lips together. Fiddles with her watch until it displays Pacific Standard Time.

  “What is going on?” I finally cry. “How are you here?” I’m losing it. That face. My god, that face, I’ve visualized it a thousand times. At one point I thought I was maybe falling in love with that face. Now I have a voice to match it. Throughout our brief relationship, we never spoke over the phone. We messaged back and forth on a dating app until I hinted that I was ready to delete it and take the next step with him, at which point we started emailing. Service was spotty in Costa Rica, where he was supposedly volunteering to help rebuild after a hurricane. He said phone calls were impossible right then but that he couldn’t wait to get back to the States and meet me in person.

  I ate it all up. I thought the emails were so romantic, like old-fashioned love letters with a modern twist, but then I grew frustrated because the emails weren’t long enough, frequent enough. Not enough in general. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted physical touch. Every night when I climb in bed I thank the gods my fake relationship with Jack never advanced to a sexual stage. Whenever I came close to skirting suggestive topics, Jack shied away, which at the time made me worry about a lack of chemistry. In retrospect, I’m glad Gemma couldn’t cross that line. I don’t know how I would have survived it if I’d unknowingly sent my colleague nudes.

  I’m an idiot. It’s never quite dawned on me before that even though the persona Gemma created was fiction, the pictures she sourced for Jack were of course real, and it stood to reason that somewhere out there, a facsimile of my fake
ex-boyfriend would be walking the earth, up until this very moment oblivious to my existence. Now he knows I exist, but he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know me like “Jack” did, and he’s observing me in a cold, harsh way that makes me cringe right down to my bones. There’s no affection, no recognition, in that gaze.

  “What do you mean, how am I here?” he replies shortly. “I live here.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” I retort. “I live here.” This is too much. “Where did you come from?”

  He’s bewildered. “Excuse me?”

  Ruth’s hand touches my shoulder, but I barely register it. She asks if I’m all right (obviously, I am not) at the same time Wesley throws his hands up and announces he doesn’t know what anybody’s talking about. The only thing I can think to do is to pull out my phone. Two texts from Gemma pop up on my screen: Hey you’re late followed a couple hours later by Are you okay? One from Christine: You didn’t clock out before leaving and didn’t receive permission to leave early. Expect to be written up. A missed call and voicemail from Paul, my boss, that I am never going to listen to.

  As I scroll through my emails to hunt for the pictures Gemma sent from Jack’s fake email (I used to have the pictures saved on my phone but deleted them months ago), I consider that maybe I’m wrong. I’ve heard about this sort of thing happening: you get hyper-focused on a person and start seeing them everywhere. Wesley might look nothing at all like Jack, but my overworked brain has been wrung out like a sponge after the long day I’ve had, so now I’m hallucinating him into being. The power lines between my eyes and neural pathways have been sawed in half by feral attic raccoons.

  Or not.

  “Aha!” I thrust my phone at them, triumphant. There he is, in black and white, my very favorite Jack McBride photo. It’s him. It’s him. He has stubble on his jaw now, and he isn’t wearing a black tux like he is in the photo, but I’m right. Oh my absolute god.

  Wesley’s gaze lifts slowly to pin on me, monochrome flushing into rich Technicolor. I watch the perturbed thoughts flashing across his beautiful brown eyes like I’m leafing through a picture book. His eyes have no equal, truly. They’re like stones in a riverbed. They’re bronze coins. They’re the leather journal of a sad, sensitive empath who writes poetry about lost lovers—

  “Why,” he utters quietly, slicing off my wandering thoughts, “do you have a picture of me at my brother’s wedding?”

  “That’s . . . a good question.”

  I pause, as though he’s the one who should answer it. “I don’t get this. No one’s supposed to be here. Plus, the house is a mess! What happened to the house? And you’re a groundskeeper? The grounds are a mess, too!” He opens his mouth, the furrow between his eyes deepening, but I rattle on: “I want to know who you are, right now. Are you friends with Gemma Peterson? Were you in on it?”

  “In on what?” He’s getting louder, too. “Who’s Gemma?”

  “Gemma Peterson!” I have had it. I am done with people messing with me. I tap at my phone furiously until I find Gemma’s Instagram and show it to him.

  “Am I supposed to know a Gemma?” Ruth cries in confusion. Wesley shrugs, but then a transformation happens. I watch it click as he recognizes Gemma’s picture.

  “That’s the woman from the golf place.”

  Ruth and I both say, “What?”

  “The golf place. In Pigeon Forge.” His gaze darts past me to Ruth. “I did landscaping for them a while back, Professor Hacker’s Lost Treasure Golf, and that woman”—he points at my screen—“worked there, over a year ago. She kept sneaking her friends in after hours to play golf for free, messing up my work, kicking up the new sod. They fired her for it.”

  Gemma smiles up at me from my phone. I can absolutely picture her doing that and the timeline makes sense. She likely came to Around the Mountain Resort & Spa directly on the heels of losing her job at Professor Hacker’s Lost Treasure Golf. I fully get why she’d track down Wesley’s Internet footprint and use him as bait to keep me away from Caleb. Who wouldn’t be lured in by that? He’s gorgeous. She took some liberties developing Jack’s personality, which, again, makes perfect sense. Jack McBride was my type: incredibly outgoing, sociable, ready and waiting to say the right thing. I don’t know Wesley, but so far he doesn’t seem very friendly.

  My lips and fingers are numb.

  “What does that woman have to do with you having my picture?” Wesley asks.

  No way am I spilling the truth. It’s too mortifying. “Never mind. I thought you were someone else.”

  “But that doesn’t—”

  Maybe if I keep interrupting him, he’ll forget. “You said that you live here, then?” My voice is numb, too. I want to fold myself into a suitcase. I want to transport myself to the moon. I want to be anywhere but here, unraveling in front of him.

  “I’ve lived here for a few years,” he returns grudgingly, speaking to a spot of nothing over my shoulder instead of looking at me. “This cabin is for the estate’s groundskeeper. Which, as we’ve established, is me.”

  I release a faint, involuntary laugh. “Yes. Which is you.”

  To think that this past Christmas, when I mailed Violet a holiday card—as I do every year—and when she read the words Hoping my love life takes a turn for the better in 2021, as in, hopefully Jack and I would get serious about our relationship and move beyond emailing, the man who wears Jack’s face might have been right beside her. The universe is just plain mean sometimes.

  My voice is a wheeze. “Small world.”

  “I guess?” Wesley rakes an aggravated hand through his hair, eyes tracking up the wall. He’s the most beautiful human I’ve ever seen, and I don’t think he likes me at all. “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on. You’re Violet’s niece? Are you here for something of hers, then?” I didn’t miss the face he made when Ruth introduced me as Julie’s girl. If he knew Violet, then he would’ve heard about my mother. He assumes I’ve come begging for handouts.

  “I’m here for the house.” My speech is almost coherent. It’s a proud moment for me.

  “You’re here for the . . .” His brows slam down. He turns on Ruth, whose smile wobbles.

  “You know, I’ve been preparing for this, and so far it hasn’t gone anything like I’ve practiced,” she tells us with faux cheer. She plunks down on the plaid couch and pats the empty cushion at her right, then the one at her left. “I can explain. Let me first explain that I wasn’t allowed to explain.”

  I sit down on her left. “You’re losing me already.”

  Wesley does not sit. He leans against the front door, narrow eyed, arms folded protectively over his chest. I cannot get over the sight of him; it’s an out-of-body experience. It’s so weird to have to sit here and pretend I’m not freaking out.

  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” Ruth begins, “but I, ah, was instructed to fudge the specifics of the will until you, Maybell, arrived at Falling Stars.” She turns to Wesley. “Which is why I dropped in on you. She said she was coming today, and I needed to be here when she arrived.”

  Wesley looks as if his top and bottom molars are trying to crush each other. Aside from a small grunt, he says nothing.

  Ruth decides I’m the easier person to focus on. “Violet thought about you every day. She wished she could have done more when you were growing up, but she was getting on in years and didn’t think she’d successfully win custody.”

  It’s odd to hear that someone has, without my knowledge, felt concern over my well-being. It’s odd to think anyone out there cared enough to remember me, to think about me when I wasn’t physically right in front of them.

  “Wesley,” Ruth continues, “Violet was so grateful for you. You really went above and beyond to take care of her, and I know in my heart she wouldn’t have lasted as long if you hadn’t come to Falling Stars.”

  She clears her throat. “She loved you bot
h, and wanted both of you to have the house. She couldn’t choose. The estate belongs to both of you.”

  A thick silence expands. Wesley assesses me with new sharpness, as though before this statement I was inconsequential but now I require a closer look.

  “Both of us,” I echo woodenly.

  “I was ordered to tell each of you separately that you inherited the house, the land, the cabin, all of it. And then, once we were all together, that’s when I could come clean that you were equal inheritors.” She straightens her shoulders, expecting to be attacked, maybe. “I’m faithfully executing Violet’s directions, so please don’t hold this against me too much.”

  Wesley stares past both of us and into a different dimension.

  I’m stuck on a loop. “Both of us.”

  Ruth nods. “The estate is fully paid for, but unfortunately there isn’t much left as far as financial inheritance. She left her vinyl record collection and ten thousand dollars to me, two thousand dollars to each of my three kids, and five thousand dollars plus her car to her nurse. Oh, and she left a few savings bonds to her mail carrier. After cremation costs and very, very generous donations to charities that were stipulated in the will, Violet has . . .” She squints, recollecting. “Thirty-one dollars and change left in her bank account.”

  Victor Hannobar started off with a local flagship store (for wallets and handbags, mainly) that expanded into multiple stores throughout Tennessee and gradually built himself a luxury goods empire (by this point, Hannobar was best known for their watches), which he sold later in life for loads of money. Enough to keep the next several generations comfortable, if they’d had children, which they didn’t. “What happened?”

  Ruth draws a breath before responding, but I have too many questions filling my head and have to interrupt. “How does being equal inheritors work? It’s not like we can”—I shoot a glance at Wesley—“both live in the house. Can we see the documents? Maybe she put down how to divide the assets, like . . . I get the manor and Ja—uh—Wesley gets the cabin.”