You Were There Too

by Colleen Oakley

I press on. “I keep thinking I must know him somehow. Don’t you think? I mean, I don’t remember ever meeting him, but it’s the only thing that could possibly make sense.”

  “Oh my god,” Raya says.

  “What?”

  “I just remembered this documentary I saw once. It was about two girls who met as teenagers and completely recognized each other, even though they were strangers. It turned out they were twins separated at birth.”

  “Are you talking about The Parent Trap?”

  “Was that it?”

  “Not a documentary.”

  “Oh, well still, I’ve always heard that about twins—that they have this weird connection and dream about each other and stuff. Maybe this guy is your long-lost brother.”

  I think about some of the dreams. Oliver’s hands. And clear my throat. “Ah . . . I don’t think he and I are related.”

  “You never know. Your mom, she wasn’t exactly faithful.”

  I should be offended, but that part is actually true. “OK, my mom is . . . my mom. But I think I’d know if I had a half sibling running around.”

  “Yeah. I suppose.”

  “What else?” I wait a beat, but Raya appears out of outlandish guesses. “Don’t you think it must mean something?” I say. “That I’ve been dreaming about this guy for years and then I actually see him? In real life?”

  Raya pauses. “I don’t know—do you think it means something?”

  “Oh Jesus. Now you sound like Vivian.”

  “Really?” she says, clearly not offended by this comparison. “I always thought I’d make a good therapist. You know, one time, when I was fifteen, my grandparents took us to Salem, Massachusetts, for some family vacation, and I had this reading with a real, bona fide witch, and she actually told me I was going to be a psychologist when I grew up. She was obviously wrong, but—” She trails off, going silent. And then: “Oh my god. That’s it—that’s exactly what you need.”

  “A psychologist? Great—thank you so much.”

  “No, a psychic.”

  “Uh, no.” I love watching Warner McKay at three a.m. talk to the dead relatives of his audience members as much as the next gal, but I don’t know that I actually believe he’s psychic. It’s all so vague: Who’s got the J name? I’m sensing something in the leg . . . a J name, who was stabbed in the thigh, or fell off a cliff and broke it or maybe had their leg amputated? It feels more like a really great guessing game.

  “No, really. They understand all that stuff—dreams and what they mean and all that. And there are a ton of psychics all over Philadelphia. There’s probably even one in little old Hope Springs.”

  “I don’t know—I kind of think that’s all a scam.”

  “Well, sure, probably some of them are. But some of them are truly legit.”

  “Hm.” I was thinking more like a dream expert or a therapist might have more legitimate insight. “I’ll think about it.”

  When we hang up, I consider calling Vivian, who is a therapist of sorts, if only to balance the scales of Raya’s mystical approach with Vivian’s logical one. But I can literally already hear what she’ll say: Mia, you’ve been under a lot of stress lately, what with the move, losing the baby—it can really do a number on your brain, make you sometimes think things that aren’t necessarily true.

  I roll my eyes and stand up. Stretching my arms overhead, her pretend voice continues. Do something! You have too much time on your hands, and you’re sitting around obsessing. Unpack! Go for a walk! Take up knitting!

  God, fake Vivian is annoying. But I know she’s also right. I do need something to occupy my mind. I walk into the kitchen, throw away my granola wrapper, and then I’m drawn out the back door, retracing my steps from the day before into the studio.

  For a few seconds, I stare at the floor where Harrison and I were lying, at the charcoal hand, and then—there it is, again—finally. I’m struck with the same urge to create. The urge that’s been eluding me since we moved to Hope Springs.

  In practiced movements, I slip my simple gold wedding band off my finger and loop it on a chain around my neck. I pull fat tubes of acrylic out of boxes, a few brushes, and arrange them on the table next to the blank canvas. And then I sit down on the stool and an image comes to me as plainly as if I’m staring at a photograph. I begin to paint.

  I stop once, to eat a bag of kettle-cooked potato chips and an apple, and then again to turn on the light when the sun fades from the windows and darkness creeps in. But I’m still painting later that night when Harrison creaks open the door to the studio and stands beneath the transom, patiently watching as my fingertips sweep across the canvas with purpose, creating four trails of yellow and orange. I rarely use brushes when painting, preferring the control of my fingers to create lines, depth, texture, shadows. Satisfied with the markings, I pick my hand up off the canvas and glance over my shoulder at my husband.

  “You’re painting,” he says.

  “I am.”

  “It’s a chicken.”

  “It is.” The one from my nightmare, not dead and wrapped in tinfoil, but alive in brilliant chartreuse and carroty orange and robin’s egg blue, squawking, its red beak gaping.

  Harrison tilts his head, considering. “Things with feathers?”

  I pause, my lip turning up on one side. “Maybe,” I say.

  Harrison steps into the studio and comes up behind me until he’s close enough to clasp my shoulder. But he keeps his hands in his pockets.

  “What time is it?” I ask.

  “Late,” he says. “Eleven.”

  I knew I had lost track of time, but I’m still surprised to learn I’ve been painting for almost twelve hours. “Rough day?”

  “Woman with perforated diverticulitis. Bad case. Tachycardic, acidotic. Had to get out before I could finish. I sent her up to the ICU for resuscitation.”

  I nod, even though I’m only vaguely familiar with the terms from overhearing Harrison use them on the phone.

  “Didn’t want to leave until I had checked on her a few times.”

  I nod again. We both stare at the chicken as if waiting for it to come alive at any second.

  “I think I’m going to look for a job,” I say, voicing the thought that’s been swirling in my mind since conjuring fake Vivian’s advice. For weeks really. But now, especially, I need something—more than my art—to keep my mind occupied.

  “Furniture store?”

  “Maybe.” I notice the tail feather needs more detail. I dip my finger in the ochre, then a touch of dark brown.

  “Have you eaten?” Harrison asks, but the words don’t register, my focus fully back on my work. He used to take it personally when I would ignore him while working, or even when I wasn’t working but was suddenly struck with something I wanted to try on a work in progress or a new idea altogether and my eyes would glaze over in midsentence. I hate it when you do that, he said one time, his voice low. It was quiet, but the new timbre—or maybe it was the seriousness with which he spoke—jerked me back to him. I looked at him, eyes wide.

  I was talking. To you.

  I’m sorry, I said, appropriately chagrined. I just—

  He put up his hand to stop me, and I sucked in my breath, wondering if this was it. The proverbial straw. My eccentric artist ways were no longer charming to him and he had had enough. I thought of all the things I could have done to prevent it—I could have tried harder. To listen that first one hundred times he half joked about it bothering him. To be present. To put him first. To not get swept away in my work. But I also knew it was impossible, so I just held my breath.

  He stared at me and then left the room. And I exhaled, feeling very much like I had dodged a bullet.

  Now, he turns to leave, his shoes clunking on the cement in retreat. I jab my finger at the canvas in short, quick strokes, and then as the door creaks op
en, I remember. “I made an appointment,” I say. “Thursday, July fifth.”

  He doesn’t speak and I wonder if maybe he didn’t hear me. Or if he’s already left, even though I didn’t hear the door thunk closed. My hand hovers over the canvas, my ear straining.

  And then, finally, he says, “OK,” and slips out into the dark night.

  Chapter 7

  Though there’s an antique store on nearly every corner in Hope Springs, there’s only one furniture store: the Blue-Eyed Macaw. It’s upscale, staged beautifully, and I can tell the owner handpicks every single item she sells. They’re also not hiring.

  I’ve spent two full weeks scouring job-opening websites, hoping something might become available that I’d be interested in—or at least not hate. The problem is Hope Springs is hopelessly tiny, and there were only two jobs that I even remotely qualified for: a waitress position at an Italian restaurant and a custodian for the elementary school. But they both required night hours, which wouldn’t solve my need to have something to do during the day—and I also didn’t love the idea of seeing Harrison even less. Expanding my search area to all of Bucks County didn’t help, so I decided to take the old-fashioned approach. Show up to places in person and hope I could charm my way into a job, starting with the Blue-Eyed Macaw.

  The manager, a tall woman with white-blond hair, a French-tipped manicure and a name tag that reads Henley, kindly lets me fill out an application anyway.

  “You know, I think I heard Sorelli’s has an opening for a waitress. Manager’s name is Richard.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “But I was really hoping for something in home décor or design. I used to be a consultant at Stanley Neal in Philly.”

  “That’s a nice store,” she says. “High-end.”

  I nod.

  “Well, Nora, the owner, she does most of the consulting when our clients request design help.” She holds up the paper I filled out. “But I’ll give this to her.”

  “Nora?” My eyes widen. “As in, the woman who owns the art gallery on Mechanic?”

  “Yeah, do you know her?”

  I sigh. I hate small towns.

  * * *

  Back outside, I stand baking in the sun, the wind out of my sails. And I have to admit that I didn’t really have a plan for where to go next in my job hunt. I had rather naively hoped my experience at Stanley Neal would be all the foot in the door I would need and the Blue-Eyed Macaw would hire me on the spot. I let out a groan as my hairline pricks with sweat and a drop starts trickling down the side of my face. I’m hot. My skin is sticky, my purple cotton sundress suddenly unbearably uncomfortable. I want to scream in frustration at the world.

  The red letters of the True Value sign at the end of the block catch my eye and I think of my tomatoes and how the leaves have only gotten more yellow (a little on the brown side, to be honest) and have yet to bear one single orb of fruit. And suddenly I’m furious at Jules and her stupid Epsom salt advice that has done nothing to salvage the plants. I turn toward the storefront and all but stomp down the sidewalk to its jangly glass door.

  After adjusting from the bright light of outside, my eyes scan the store until I spot Jules’s helmet of gray curls over by a display of hammers. As I march toward her, my anger builds on itself, until I’m sure she’s at fault not only for the tomatoes, but for the lack of any decent jobs in Hope Springs, the loss of all my babies and, quite possibly, global warming.

  “Jules.” I snarl her name, and she turns slowly, peering through her glasses at the UPC stuck on the handle of a hammer. She shifts her gaze to me, her eyes watery and wide behind the frames. Her face is a roadmap of deep wrinkles, her neck still jowly, and these trappings of age take the fight out of me as quick as air leaves a popped balloon. I’m deflated.

  “Yes,” she says in her throaty voice. “Can I help you?” She clearly doesn’t remember me.

  “My tomatoes are dying,” I mumble.

  “Oh.” Her face brightens. “Have you tried Epsom salt? We don’t sell it here. You’ll have to go to the Giant.”

  I stare at her, mouth slightly open. I sigh. “I’ll try that,” I say. “Thanks.”

  She nods and begins humming as she hangs up the hammer she was holding and then ambles away from me, down an aisle, toward the back of the store.

  Behind me, I hear the sharp intake of breath and then a low, deep voice: “Bad advice.” Startled, I turn, and find myself inches from an all-too-familiar face.

  A strangled-sounding hiccup of surprise emerges from my throat, and I take a step back.

  He straightens his spine. “Sorry. It’s Mia, right?” His voice is friendly, warm, but the way he’s looking at me is completely unnerving. Or maybe I’m just completely unnerved, his expression notwithstanding.

  I will myself to respond—to say anything—but find I’ve lost all command of the English language. And I realize that these past few weeks, though I had not forgotten about him, I had somehow compartmentalized our interaction, like a museum curator handling a Dalí acquisition. File under surreal.

  But now he’s standing right in front of me, a melting clock come to life.

  “Oliver,” he says, gesturing to himself. “We met at Dr. Okafor’s? Your husband saved my sister’s life?”

  I force myself to recover. “Yeah, yes, of course,” I say, studying his familiar visage. His lopsided smile—a deep parenthetical line appears only on the right side, like a dimple that decided not to stay in one spot. His full, bushy eyebrows, his thin lips, the way after he pulls at the crown of his head, pieces of hair stay sticking straight up. Did I remember these details from my dreams? Or from seeing him in the waiting room? The difficulty in parsing dream and reality makes me heady.

  And then I actually hear the sentence he said, as it ricochets around in my brain like a pinball. “Wait—sister?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Caroline?”

  “I didn’t . . . I assumed that you were . . .”

  He stares at me for a beat. “That we were . . .” His eyes widen. “Oh! No.” He chuckles. “I guess that makes sense, since we were at an OB/GYN together. But no—brotherly support. She’s just kind of . . . freaked out by the whole thing.”

  “Oh.”

  Though I’ve been gaping at him like he’s a wild tiger that suddenly appeared in the middle of the hardware store, I notice for the first time that he’s holding a plunger. His other hand is stuffed in his pocket. It seems ludicrous—an accessory that doesn’t fit the intensity of the situation—and I have to swallow back a bubble of laughter.

  “Plumbing issues?” I say, for lack of anything else.

  “Old house. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” He flicks his eyes in the direction Jules walked and cocks an eyebrow. “Problem with your tomatoes?”

  I take a deep breath, trying to calm my still-racing heart, and stare at his ears. They stick out too far from his head, which would be an unfortunate flaw on someone else but on him it adds something—a charming vulnerability. “Yeah. Problem with the whole garden, really. I inherited it when we moved in. And I have no idea what I’m doing. Besides killing it.”

  “Well, whatever you do, don’t use the Epsom salt.”

  And I remember his first two words to me: Bad advice. Embarrassed to admit it’s too late, I shoot him a questioning look.

  “It’s kind of an old wives’ tale—that Epsom salt will boost the magnesium in the soil; but most soil isn’t deficient in magnesium, at least not so much that a regular fertilizer can’t fix it. And Epsom salt can actually do more harm than good—causing leaf scorch. And if you have blossom end rot, it’ll make that worse.”

  “Huh.” My mind swirls with the information he’s unloaded, as well as all my emotions: shock and confusion, of course, but also surprise at how easily we seem to have slipped into a somewhat normal conversation. If talking about Epsom salt can be considered n
ormal. “So . . . are you a farmer?”

  “Not exactly,” he says slyly. “But I do have a little experience with agriculture.” He runs his familiar hand through his familiar hair. The ends stick up.

  “What do yellow spots on the leaves mean?”

  He rocks back on his heels and makes a clicking noise with his cheek. “Any number of things, really. Overwatering. Underwatering. Nutrient deficiency. But it could have nothing to do with the soil at all—could be a fungal issue called blight or even a pest problem. Aphids, thrips, spider mites.”

  “Yeah, that’s more or less what Google said, too. Was hoping someone might be able to narrow it down.”

  “Sorry to disappoint,” he says, but the side of his mouth curls up and the familiarity of it once again takes my breath.

  He glances at his watch—one of those techy exercise bands, causing me to wonder if he’s a runner like Harrison—and I take a step back, clearly having held him longer than social etiquette allows. I open my mouth to say something benign, normal. Like how nice it was to run into him again. Good luck with the plumbing.

  “I’ve actually got some time,” he says, scratching his jawline with his free hand. It’s covered in black pinpricks of day-old stubble. “Want me to come take a look?”

  “What?”

  “At your garden?” he says slowly.

  “Oh, uh . . . no,” I stutter, caught off guard. “That’s OK. It’s fine. I’m sure you have a million other things you could be doing. Like plumbing.”

  “I really don’t mind,” he says. “I kind of owe you.”

  “You do?”

  “Your husband saving Caroline and all.” He pauses. “Harrison is your husband, yeah?”

  “Yeah, yes. Right.” I swallow, hoping I don’t sound as idiotic as I think I do. And then I consider his offer—the thought of spending more time with him both appealing and daunting. I’m obviously a ball of bumbling nerves in his presence, but I’m also wildly curious to know more about him. Maybe I could uncover something—anything—that would explain the dreams. And really, what else am I going to do today? “OK, that would be great. I mean, if you really don’t mind.”