The Infinite Onion
Page 39
In the courtyard, I squished myself into a lawn chair near Vince and Mitch and let the rumble-chuckle of their deep voices sedate me, dozed with my head buried in the rose trellis until Kai ran into the courtyard and barreled into Mitch, nearly knocking over his chair.
“Watch it,” Mitch said.
“Dad. Hey, Dad.” Kai patted Mitch’s knees and hopped from foot to foot. “I decided.”
“Okay. I’ll bite,” Mitch said. “What did you decide?”
Kai squeezed between his dad’s knees to hug him. “I’m going to be an actor.”
Mitch held my gaze over Kai’s head. I nodded to acknowledge his unspoken thanks.
After Kai ran off, in the lull before Clementine and Talia arrived to help with dinner prep and Oliver returned with the groceries, I heeded a finch’s complicated warble from the yard and stood, drawn to take a minute alone in advance of the chaos. “Back in a few, guys. Need anything?”
Vince shook his head. Mitch held up his half-full beer bottle. “All good.”
When I’d walked far enough into the yard that I could no longer hear voices, I stopped to study the expanse of lush grass bordered by dense forest.
“I sort of have a yard,” I said out loud with a smug smile.
YARD was a decent idea for my journal entry for the day, but I thought I could do better. I held my open journal on my palm, twirled the ballpoint pen in my other hand, and waited for inspiration. The moment unspooled until I lost track of time.
Tires on gravel. The slam of the van doors. Penelope’s high, bossy voice. Oliver’s indistinct answer. Edward’s bark. A sharp hoot of laughter from Isis, who’d traded shifts at the library so she could attend our party.
In letters big enough to fill the page, I wrote CLAN and put the journal and pen away to scan the forest. At some point, I’d begun to memorize individual trees, to include them in my clan. Can’t have too many pals.
I recognized Oliver’s footsteps through the grass. I’d memorized that too.
“Notice anyone new?” Oliver asked when he stopped beside me.
“Tween western hemlock. Ten o’clock. Just beyond the cedar.”
“Hey, buddy.”
I loved it when Oliver talked to the trees I introduced him to.
“Want help unloading the van?” I asked.
“Kids are on it.”
After a few silent seconds Oliver took a deeper breath and turned to face me. Serious eyes above his broad smile. “Do you have a minute?”
I snorted. He knew I had all the minutes in the world for him. “Sure. What’s up?”
“I’ve been thinking about… a lot of things. About the forest, about… Aza.”
Uh-oh. Whatever Oliver had to say, if it put him in hesitation mode, it was big.
“About kids.” Oliver went on, “Your current kids and… other kids you’ll work and play with.” With a sly glance at me from under his eyelashes, Oliver brought a folder out from behind his back and handed it to me.
“Hey, did you update our contract?” I’d started classes at a community college in West Seattle, in preparation for applying to university, and had asked Oliver to reward me for homework.
Oliver didn’t answer, except to gesture at me to open the folder.
The papers inside looked more official than Oliver’s contracts. I scanned the top page, saw the word “Deed,” flipped to the next page and the next. My hands began to shake. “Oh my God.”
A small laugh escaped Oliver. “I thought it would be nice if you had a… forest. Of your own.”
I didn’t mean to, didn’t plan to, but sunk to my knees on the grass. To my dismay, I began to cry. I tried to stop, to close the breach, but I couldn’t. All the fears and disappointments I’d weathered over my thirty-nine years seemed to gush out all at once. I held the deeds off to the side so I wouldn’t get snot on them.
Oliver came down with me. He didn’t make fun of me for crying, only knelt in front of me until I could find my voice. “Oliver. You can’t.” I pushed the folder at him. “Why is my name the only name on—”
“Hush.” Oliver didn’t take the folder. “Hush now. I have something to say.”
I nodded, eyes locked on the folder. The deeds quivered in the double-handed clutch of my outstretched hands.
“To me,” Oliver said, “these deeds are a scholarship you’ve more than earned—compensation for the hard work you did as a child when you should have been playing. Now you have somewhere to play forever, and no one can take it away from you.”
I commanded my arms to refuse the gift, to set the folder on the grass if Oliver wouldn’t take it, but rebel fingers clamped tight, the disregarded boy in me demanding reparation.
“It’s done, Grant. Suck it up.” Oliver tapped the folder. “In total, it’s a little over thirty-six acres—contiguous parcels from the western edge of my holdings. I suspect we’ll eventually add you to the deeds for my remaining properties, including the house, but I wanted to give this to you now. Even if we don’t work out, I want you to have your own property, and… Aza’s treehouse.”
An ugly sob escaped me. I couldn’t even shake my head. I wanted the treehouse too much.
“Think of this as Aza’s gift to you, Grant. For the life I believe you could have helped him keep, and for the lives of the children you’ll play with and heal.” Oliver ran the backs of his hands down my cheeks to wipe at the wetness. “I have no doubt you’ll care for your property very well.”
I hugged the deeds to my chest and bent to press my forehead to Oliver’s knees.
I have a clubhouse.
I’d always wanted a clubhouse.
For the longest time, I hugged the deeds and blinked away tears, my mind a jumble of blankness, birdsong, and random thoughts. Oliver swept his hands over the back of my head and neck, ran fingers through my hair. I felt like I’d stumbled into one of his fantasies and gotten stuck there.
Clover’s clear laugh rang out from the house, brought my attention to a point.
Her parents had declined our invitation to the party.
I thought of Clover’s sweet, round face. I thought of the long years of my lonely childhood. I thought of Oliver as a little boy abandoned in different ways by his parents, and I thought of our decision to tell the kids they would always have a home with us, if ever they needed it, for as long as we lived. Maybe even after we’d gone. The deeds turned my promises to them into a mission. In my mind’s eye, I lifted an infinity symbol to my face like a pair of glasses and saw our rose-colored future, mine and Oliver’s and the people we pulled in to journey with us around the loops. Magic and miracles and love under all our reluctant skins.
When I could, I gave my face a rub against Oliver’s shorts and sat up. “Thank you seems too small a thing to say,” I croaked.
Oliver winked. “Give it time. It’ll sink in at some point.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider? Maybe wait a year or two to see what happens with us first?”
“Fuck, no. You need a home base, no matter what, and I have loads more property. What am I going to do with it all anyway?” Oliver stood and reached out a hand to pull me up.
We’ll love it together.
I risked a one-handed grip on my precious deeds to take Oliver’s hand, breathed through the dizzy moment, and stood, recalibrated to a new order.
As we strolled toward the house, a devious thought slithered through my mind.
Tit for tat.
Chapter 89
Oliver
Two days after our party, Grant plucked me out of bed much too early, wrangled my legs into my pajama bottoms, and pulled my arms through the sleeves of one of his XXXL sweatshirts. He was back to his normal size, due to all the food I’d been stuffing into him.
“Mmm,” I murmured, warm and cozy enough to fall back to sleep.
“Seven.”
I let my eyes half-close, hypnotized by the swish swish of grass as we walked. Grant led me past the toolshed, down the trail to the throne. When we got there, he sat and took my hands to pull me in and straddle his lap. I squeezed my thighs against his. Grant’s wide shoulders bowed toward me in the confines of the curved space. Face to face with The Wolf Emperor on his throne.
Grant and I had pored over animal books and scoured the internet until he’d decided on wolf. It suited him, and made me feel even more like family. I thought of myself as Coyote-Fox Wolf. First name, last name.
Under my left thigh, I felt the tight cylinder of the June Zodiac scroll in Grant’s pocket. I’d brought him the August Cancer scroll, assuming he was into astrology, but when I’d given it to him, he’d laughed and chucked it unopened into the kitchen trash with a terse, “Unnecessary.” Then he’d mauled me until I came with a startled squeal all over the tile of the kitchen floor. He’d zipped his pants with a leer and ambled out the back door to do something in the toolshed. I knew he’d gone to the toolshed because I was still sprawled on the cool floor on my stomach—panting, stunned, and sticky—when I heard the power saw start up.
I leaned into the shadow of the throne and licked my lips to tease Grant into getting busy.
“Oliver?” Grant said, caution in his voice.
I gave him a quick peck on the lips and pulled back. “Yes, Grant.”
“Have you tried looking for her?”
“Oh.” Topic shift. I put my sexy daydreams on hold and shook my head. “No. Not… yet. I checked Dad’s papers, but there wasn’t anything there about her, not after she left.”
“Any digital messages from her that you maybe didn’t delete?”
“Um… no. And she… stopped trying after a while.”
“You haven’t looked for her online?”
The frayed collar of Grant’s old T-shirt caught my attention. We need to go clothes shopping again. I pressed the loose threads with my fingers and shook my head. “She might have moved from… Geneva by now. Or maybe she…” I hadn’t done an online search because I didn’t want to risk a funeral notice popping up. “She’d be fifty-six now. If she’s, you know… alive.”
The injustice of what my father and I had done to her brought up a sigh. I bowed my head onto Grant’s shoulder. I did want to talk about her. I knew I needed to look for her, even if it was difficult. Because it was difficult. “Even if she’s alive, even if I could find her, it’s…” I shrugged against the weight of guilt. “Dad rejected her so completely. And then so did I. She probably doesn’t even want—”
“You were wounded, Oliver. I understand why you locked yourself away after Aza and your dad died. It would have been hard to risk more hurt by reconnecting with her.”
I turned my face into Grant’s neck. “Don’t you think I’m too… broken? I mean, even if I found her, I really don’t think she’d want—”
“No. I don’t think you’re broken at all.”
I shrugged again, not believing him.
“Hey.” Grant gave me a little shake. “Listen up, buddy. When all the people you’d been closest to were gone, like dead gone, you did what you had to do to take care of yourself. Coyote-Fox bundled you up to keep you safe. You stayed on your property, secure in your bandages, put up the red flag, pared down to a few friends, and focused on your art—all so you wouldn’t break any more than you already had.”
I barely breathed, watched Grant’s throat as he spoke in his deep voice.
“Those bandages kept you whole,” he said.
I felt the truth of what he’d said, how I’d made a life for myself down inside the pain of the lives I’d lost. Grant’s version of my life almost turned me into a hero.
“It didn’t have to be me who unwrapped you,” Grant said. “Any number of people or situations might have done it less annoyingly than I did. Eventually. Maybe even Freddie.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Nah. You’re right. It had to be me.”
I chuckled and slumped into Grant’s chest, grateful for his warmth.
After a few minutes, I felt Grant move his hands behind my back. It took a moment to realize he was doing something on his phone.
“Let’s do this,” Grant muttered.
“Okay,” I said, too content to need to know what he meant.
“I found her yesterday.”
In the middle of an exhale, my lungs failed. “You… What?” My voice degraded to a whisper. “Oh, shit. Is she dead?”
“Madeleine Rossi, Professor of Banking and Finance at a fancy London university,” Grant said, “plus about a hundred other titles below that one. I’m looking at her photo right now on the university website. She looks like you, Oliver. Gorgeous, pointy-faced, and foxy. Thick, red-gold hair. Burnished copper eyes.”
My face did something it had never done before—pulled in on itself tight in a spasm of indecision.
Grant moved his arms against my back again, and I heard a sequence of tones, like he was—“Stop.” I jerked back, tried to break free. “I’m not ready.”
He held me close. “Shh. Be still.”
I went cold and inert, nose pressed to the back of the throne. Flash freeze.
The faint sound of a voice from the phone hummed into the shadowed air of the throne. A man’s voice, but I couldn’t make out his words.
“Good afternoon to you too,” Grant said with a lilt. “I’m calling on behalf of Madeleine Rossi’s son, Oliver. Is there any chance I could talk with her, or make a phone appointment to talk with her?”
My burst of breath ricocheted back to me off the wood. I stared at a carved mouse on a tree branch. I waited.
“Well, when are her official office hours? I can call back when she’s—” Grant stopped as if he’d been interrupted. He put a hand up between us to try to push me back, but I held tight to his shoulders.
“It’s her,” Grant said against my ear. He unwrapped my arms from around his neck and tapped the speaker button on the phone.
“Please don’t hang up,” Grant said. “He’s right here.”
I couldn’t make my arms move, but I lifted my eyes to the infinity symbol I’d carved to hover above Grant’s head. Time to peel. When I met Grant’s amused eyes, he put his mouth against my lips, smiled, and said, “Ollie, Ollie oxen free.”
“Hello?” An exhale from the phone, that’s all it was, but I recognized it.
I remembered I wasn’t broken and found a breath. “It’s… it’s me.”
“Oliver?”
“Hi, Mom.”
Isn’t that what creativity is—the natural desire to transcend the known and become greater than the sum of our parts?
Deb Norton
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A Note
from Alice
I took quite a few liberties when describing the area of Vashon Island, Washington, where Oliver lives. I added and subtracted roads, land features, and buildings to support the tale I wanted to tell.
The town of Vashon underwent a few small revisions in the story.
The route Oliver chose at the end of the story follows actual roads. Take a jaunt to Vashon in high summer and drive or bike it yourself. You’ll be charmed.
Acknowledgments
During the creation of this story, wonderful people and things aided and inspired me.
I offer deep bows of reverence to INFJ writing coach Lauren Sapala and life coach Maggie Huffman. They ripped off the roof, over and over, to reveal views of clear sky.
Amari Ice, Lukas Egetmeyer, and Heather Mae Russell provide bestie juju of the most nourishing variety. I’m thrilled every day by what and how we create together. Suanne Laqueur graces me with her humor, smarts, talent, and friendship (lucky me).
All hail to beta readers Lauren Sapala, Chris E. Saros, Kelly Jensen, C.C., A.B., and K.G. for thoughtful feedback and encouragement.
Christa Désir brought her prodigious editing skills to the final stage of the manuscript. She also brought in Manuela Velasco, who has prodigious editing skills of her own, as a sensitivity reader and additional editor. Christa founded the mentorship and services organization Tessera Editorial, whose members provide editing and diverse perspectives to publishers and authors.
Cover designer Tracy Kopsachilis and formatter Colleen Sheehan again lavished me with artistry and patience, a combination that keeps me going back for more.