“You gonna use those on me?” I look pointedly at his clenched fists. “I guess you’re just like Daddy after all.” I toss it out with feigned nonchalance.
Taylor takes a step back as if I’ve slapped him. When he looks at me again, his eyes are filled with shock, confusion, and deep hurt.
I’ve finally done it. I have destroyed this thing between us once and for all.
I get in my car and drive away, and I don’t need to look back to know that he makes no move to come after me.
Chapter Seventeen
I don’t remember that drive home.
I don’t remember parking the car or making my way upstairs to the apartment. But suddenly I find myself standing in the kitchen watching Landon stare back at me, concern etched into her every feature.
I don’t imagine there is any emotion on my face. I am utterly void of feelings. I have nothing left.
I am not aware I have the ability to make sound until the words fall from my mouth in a sob.
“I fuck up everything I touch,” I tell her.
When I slide to the floor she is immediately beside me holding my hand.
“That’s not true,” she tells me earnestly.
It isn’t worth debating it with her; I know I am right. My entire life and nearly all the relationships in it are evidence enough.
“God.” I scrub at my cheeks. “I am so sick of crying.”
“Max,” she chides me softly.
Only Landon would scold you for using the Lord’s name in vain even when your life is in a tailspin.
“Sorry,” I respond.
“It’s OK.” She smiles at me. “And crying is OK too.”
I start to roll my eyes, but she calls me out again.
“Come on, Max. The only way you are going to move past any of this is if you mature a little.”
I am so affronted that my tears stop immediately. I look at her in shock.
“I’m older than you are,” I throw at her.
She lets go of my hand and smooths a nonexistent wrinkle out of her pajama pants.
“I was talking about your maturity level, not your age,” she says quietly.
I start to protest, ready to argue the point, thrilled to fall back into our familiar routine. But Landon looks at me, intent and serious, and suddenly I do feel younger and infinitely less knowledgeable.
“Max, you are gorgeous and funny and so smart. You’re an amazing baker and sister, and even though you won’t believe this, you’re an amazing friend.”
I open my mouth, but she quells me with a look.
“No,” she says sternly, “it’s time to listen now.”
I snap my mouth closed.
“You are all those things, and I love you so much, OK?” she says.
When she waits for a response, I nod because that seems like what she wants me to do. I don’t think it is wise to argue.
“But you’re also emotionally immature in a lot of ways.”
I fold my arms but continue to hold my tongue.
“You have to give yourself some understanding. When you lost the baby—”
I am so shocked she said it that it takes me a moment to try to scramble to my feet. I can’t believe she has the gall to mention it to me so casually!
Landon pulls me back down. I cross my arms again and look at the ground.
“We have to talk about it, Max; you have to talk about it. It happened to you, and it was horrible, but keeping quiet is why you’re so closed off now. Nineteen is still so young, and even though you’re older, I wonder if some parts of you are still that nineteen-year-old.” I look up at her in surprise.
“Running away, closing yourself off, alienating the people that love you, snapping at anyone who gets too close—those are coping mechanisms, and you’re entitled to them, up to a point. You don’t want to go through the rest of your life this way, do you?”
I should be offended, I guess, because she is essentially saying that who I am right now isn’t someone I should want to be. I should feel angry or maybe even hurt, but there isn’t a single ounce of malice in any part of Landon. I can feel her good intentions, how desperately she wants to get through to me, and with that realization comes another one. I don’t want to be this way anymore, but I also don’t know how to be anything else. I look away from her.
“I can’t go back to the way things were; that’s what everyone doesn’t understand. My parents, my brothers . . . Even when they didn’t know why I had changed, they still couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just flip a switch and turn back into the girl in those pictures.”
“Of course you can’t go back,” Landon responds immediately. “You’re not that girl anymore. But you can move forward.”
This time I do roll my eyes at her.
“I did move forward. I just had to change a bit in order to pull it off,” I tell her flippantly.
“You didn’t,” she says seriously. “You’re still back there in that hospital room. You carry it with you every day. You beat yourself up.”
I have nothing to say to that.
“I know you won’t like me saying this, Max, but I have to tell you anyway.” Landon reaches for my hand again, and I fight the urge to shake her off. “The other night you said that God answered your prayers.”
My stomach turns at the memory. I hate hearing it on someone else’s lips.
“It sounds like you’re tearing yourself up because of an emotional reaction you had when you were a teenager. I’m sure a lot of women struggle with the news that they’re unexpectedly pregnant. That’s a natural response, and you were so young. It doesn’t mean you would have been any less of a mom. You didn’t lose the baby because God was punishing you. Losing a pregnancy just happens sometimes. It’s not your fault.”
I can’t breathe for a moment, and then I take in too much air too fast. I look over at her in shock. How can someone with eyelash extensions who is unironically wearing poodle pajamas voice the exact fear that I’ve carried around like a yoke for years?
Even if some small, rational part of my brain knows I didn’t wish the baby away, the guilt I’ve had about my initial reaction has overridden everything else. I realize with sudden clarity that she is right. I have let that belief—I have let that guilt—shape every other part of my life.
I take a deep breath and let it out again.
Landon is right, but what am I supposed to do with that information? It’s not like I can just snap my fingers and stop being this way.
“So what exactly do you think I should do?”
My question comes out a little hostile, but she ignores the tone.
“I think,” she says carefully, “that it would be really helpful for you to meet with a therapist.”
I fight the urge to scream at the familiar request. That is what my mom has been asking me to do for years. I have no desire to sit with someone twice a week and rehash all of the things I fought so hard to forget. I do not want to yell at Landon, though. I know she is only trying to be helpful.
“Not going to happen,” I say through clenched teeth.
Landon lets out a breath of her own. She looks up and around, searching the kitchen for inspiration. Her eyes alight on the fridge, and she jumps up to pull something out of it and rustle around in the cabinets. When she sits down next to me again, she is holding two shot glasses and a chilled bottle of tequila from our freezer.
“You want to get drunk?” I ask, confused.
“No,” she says, pouring a shot for each of us. “I want us to drink this shot, and then I want you to tell me. One time, all the way through, from the beginning.”
I look at her like she is insane.
“And then someone will know, and you had control over whether or not to tell them. Truly understanding that you’re in control of the telling will really help you,” she says simply.
“How would you know?” I snap.
“Because”—Landon looks right at me—“when you had your accident and I found you, I
had nightmares for weeks. I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing blood everywhere. Every time I put my key in the lock, I would start to panic because I thought I’d open the door and find you hurt or . . . or worse.”
I have never, not once, asked her about that night. I imagined she must have been frightened, but I didn’t want to hear the details. It had never even occurred to me that it might have been that difficult for her to get through. I feel sick hearing about having put her through even more than I had imagined.
“Hey,” she says gently, “I didn’t say that to make you feel badly. That was another situation that you had no control over, right?”
I fight to deny it, but she is right. I’d gotten sick that night, but I would have never let it happen if I could have prevented it.
“Exactly,” she agrees when I nod. “I told you because I wanted to explain why I went to a therapist afterwards. The therapist told me to set an alarm on my phone and force myself to think about that night in detail throughout the day for ten minutes at a time.”
“What?” I demand, feeling defensive on her behalf.
“I know; it seemed crazy to me too. But the point was that I needed to know I could control my thoughts. By scheduling time to think about the worst of it, I kind of tricked my brain into not thinking about it all the time. And then I didn’t think about it at all. So,” she says, handing me a shot glass, “if you talk about it with me, I think you’ll feel a little more in control. And if you have a bad day or you’re feeling sad, you can tell me the story again. You can tell me over and over until the memory loses some of its power over you.”
Landon looks me right in the eye then. “You can run or walk or crawl past it if you have to, but you have to get to the other side of this thing.”
She smiles then, a little mischievously.
“Remember in 28 Days, when she was really battling an addiction to alcohol and—”
“Oh my gosh, fine!” I bark in annoyance.
She holds her shot between us.
“To Sandra?” she asks with a small smile.
“To Sandra.” I clink my glass against her own.
We settle with our backs against the cabinets. I don’t face her. I look at the dishwasher, the rug from Ikea, even the baseboard under the cabinet that hasn’t been cleaned since the late eighties.
Finally, I open my mouth and tell her my story.
I talk about my biological father running out on us when I was little. I talk about watching my mom work three jobs to try to take care of Malin and me. I tell her about meeting the Ashtons for the first time and how I thought it was a real-life fairy tale. I tell her how perfect my childhood was after that and how hard I tried to be perfect too, so I could fit in. I tell her about how I had my future all planned out. How proud I was to get a track scholarship, even though I didn’t need one, how excited I was to go away to school by myself, how grown up I’d felt. I talk about the frat party freshman year of school. How I’d had just enough alcohol to make all the bad choices seem like good ones and how that made it worse, because in the end I’d known they were my choices. I talk about the pregnancy and everything that came afterwards. I talk and talk and talk, about getting the job and lying to everyone, how good it felt when I started to succeed there, and how upset I was to learn I won’t be able to stay.
Through it all Landon remains silent. I can see her nodding along, and at some points she holds my hand to give me the courage to keep speaking, but she never once says anything. I tell her about Taylor and his stupid cat and how many desserts he has eaten on my behalf. I tell her about the kiss, and that I thought he might be one of my best friends. When I tell her about our conversation in the parking lot and how badly I’ve hurt him, I find out that as impossible as it seems, I still have tears in me after all.
“What am I supposed to do now?” I ask miserably.
She takes a big breath and looks right at me.
“First, you’re going to get some sleep. Tomorrow we’re going to make some coffee, eat that rabbit food you call cereal, and then we’re going to get a manicure.”
I wince in reaction to her ridiculous plan. I’m talking about the destruction of my personal and professional life, and she’s talking about our nails. Landon is already standing up and pulling me along with her.
“Roll your eyes all you want to, but fresh nails make everything better.” She has the audacity to wink at me. “You’ll see.”
A fresh manicure doesn’t make everything better, but it helps.
Or really, I guess talking to Landon had helped. I can’t fix everything overnight, but I can at least try to, well, try.
The first step towards anything is to figure out what I want to do now. I will be done working at Dolci in a couple of weeks, and I have to decide where I go from there. As pointless as it seems, since she is rarely lucid enough for intelligent conversation, I need to talk to Avis about it.
I find her in Dolci’s small office, eating a Handi-Snack.
“I don’t like the breadstick kind,” she says as soon as I walk in. “Using the little red thing to dig out the cheese is half the fun.”
She maneuvers the plastic stick in her hand to smear gelatinous orange “cheese” onto a cracker, which she then pops into her mouth. She raises her eyebrows at me expectantly.
That twitch of her brow makes her seem more perceptive right now than she’s been in the entire time I’ve known her.
I take the chair opposite her.
“I thought I’d ask you for some advice,” I tell her.
She lifts another cracker from her little box and starts to cover it with cheese like the last one.
If Gollum were a little old French woman with a snack pack . . .
“About what you should do next,” she finally supplies.
I nearly fall out of my chair. Apparently she is cognizant enough to recognize the world outside of the one-foot radius surrounding her crackers.
“Yes,” I answer, “about what I should do next. I was hoping you might offer some advice.”
Or a letter of reference.
“Well, you could go anywhere,” she says with a shrug. “Certainly any of the chefs from last week would be interested.”
I sit a little straighter in my chair. I don’t especially love the idea of being a stage, but the chefs from last week are preeminent. Any one of them would be incredible to learn from. I never considered trying to get a job with one of them, because I had spent so little time with Avis.
“You think they might need a stage?” I ask eagerly.
Avis’s mouth twists as if she’s bitten into something distasteful.
“What are you talking about?” she asks.
Oh damn, maybe I am losing her attention.
“About me being a stage for one of the chefs.” I try to remind her of our conversation. “You said they might consider me.”
“As a stage?” she asks slowly.
Maybe it is coming back to her.
“Yes, I didn’t go to culinary school, remember?” I try to get the words out quickly, before I lose her attention again. “I’ve only been working with you for a little while, and I know that’s not enough to list on a résumé, but I thought maybe if you put in a call—”
“Mary, mother of pearl,” she says in wonder. “You really don’t know, do you?”
I sigh. Now will come some crazy speech about storks or crackers, and then she’ll ask me for a Slurpee. It isn’t her fault she is a little off, though, and I had been hired to manage her.
“Don’t know what?” I ask to placate her.
“You actually believe you’re making my recipes,” she says, peering closer at me.
Crap! Is this where she tells me her ideas come from leprechauns or the aliens she met at the eighth level of scientology?
“They’re not my recipes, Stork.” She points her little red stick at me.
I smile at her as kindly as I can; I have no idea where this is going.
“OK, so whose re
cipes are they, Avis?”
She reaches back and puts the little stick into her bun, alongside a mechanical pencil. She peers at me through her giant glasses.
“Oh, Stork,” she says with a chuckle. “They’re yours.”
“What?” I ask stupidly.
It is almost as crazy a statement as the leprechauns would have been.
“What?” I say again.
Avis sits back, folds her bony arms across her chest, and smiles like the Cheshire cat.
“The first time, with the galette? I was messing with you.”
“What?” seems to be the only thing I can get out.
“I was messing with you. I wrote a bunch of scribbles down. Thought you’d scramble around and try to figure them out. Thought it’d be fun to watch.” She smiles. “But then you came back with a really damn good galette. I was intrigued. I wanted to see if you could do it again. And you did.”
I am shaking my head in denial.
“No,” I tell her. “I recognized ingredients. I could always see the start of a recipe.”
Avis is shaking her own head before I finish speaking.
“I put down one thing, maybe two at the most—enough so that you’d think the rest of it must be real. There was no recipe there, Stork. Those came from your head.”
“I’m not a pastry chef like you. I don’t know how to create recipes at this level.”
“Sorry,” she says, not really sounding sorry at all, “those scraps gave you a safety net. I’ve never provided you with a single new recipe in the entire time that you’ve been here.”
My mind whirls at the implications of what she is saying. If I really have been creating the recipes the whole time, that meant that last week I served—
“Marcus Balmain and his guests—”
“Ate a dessert sampler conceptualized, designed, plated, and presented entirely by you,” she says, sounding utterly pleased with herself.
“What if I had failed?” I ask weakly.
“C’est impossible,” she says, dismissing the notion in French.
Words are utterly lost to me; I can’t think of a single response.
“I have some advice, Stork,” she says, folding her hands primly in front of her.
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