Nervous about tipping into dangerous territory, I gulp the last of my drink. “I just want to be able to look at a person and say, ‘I want you.’ Or ‘I really like you so much.’ It’s like none of us—not me, not any of my friends, no one I know, will ever just put themselves out there and say, ‘I want to be with you.’ We’re all scared of giving up the power of being the person who cares less.”
“Well, that’s—” Brian begins, though what can he really say to that?
Ethan slides out of the booth and stands. He snaps open his wallet and throws several bills on the table. When he turns away, his eyes lock onto mine, and there’s something so sad and tortured in them that I actually gasp.
“What’s wrong?” Brian asks, alarmed.
“Nothing. Just . . . My, um, colleague seems upset.”
Ethan stalks past me, and I’m shocked to see the girl—the Ice Queen—rise and rush after him. Only, as she passes, I can see her face is blotchy and that tears glitter in her eyes.
“What the hell is going on?” I half hear myself say.
“Lovers’ quarrel?” Brian suggests.
But that’s impossible. They’ve never seen each other before.
Have they?
Chapter 32
Ethan
Q: Do you forgive and forget, or hold a grudge?
Alison follows me outside.
“Ethan, what’s going on?”
The tone of her voice is so familiar, it sends chills down my spine. I should keep walking. I don’t owe her a fucking thing. But she’s so confused. Something’s not right about this. About her being here tonight.
I stop. “Did you plan this, Alison?”
“No. I thought you did.” She appears in front of me, but I keep my eyes on the passing cars. A parking valet across the street catches a set of keys in the air and jogs around the corner.
“I only got your name a few minutes ago,” she says. “I got a message with the details for the date. I thought someone was playing a joke on me at first when I saw your name. Then I started to hope you’d finally decided to talk to me.”
I look at her for the first time. She’s beautiful. It was the first thing I noticed about her years ago, and she hasn’t changed. She’s beautiful the way an icicle is. Cool and sharp. Not half as fragile as she appears to be.
I swallow and draw a breath and swallow again, trying to figure out what the hell to say.
“So you came here to meet someone else,” I say, and suddenly I’m fighting back images of Alison sitting on her bed in her bra, sheets tangled around her, eating takeout Chinese food with another guy. Since that night, she’s called and texted me a hundred times. I managed to avoid her. I thought it was over. Until now. “I can’t say that surprises me.”
Alison winces. “Ethan—” She pushes her long blonde hair behind her ear. “I don’t know how this happened. I promise you, it wasn’t something I did. But I’ve been wanting to see you so much. And if you’ll just give me a chance, and listen to me . . .”
She falls quiet, wrapping her arms around herself.
A remote part of my mind finds this interesting. Alison doesn’t get nervous or flustered. In situations where she should be nervous, she becomes ruthless. Lethal. She’s like a snake that way.
The valet pops up beside us, out of breath and smiling, his bowtie crooked. “Are you two waiting for your car?”
Alison looks at him. “No,” she says. One word but it packs a punch. There’s the girl I know.
The valet retreats so fast he practically sends up sparks on the pavement. Then we’re alone again.
“Are you dating, E?” she asks, throwing me off. “I guess you are, if you’re using Boomerang.”
I shake my head. “No. I work there. This is work for me. These dates.”
“Oh.” Alison actually looks relieved. Her arms loosen around her stomach. “Me too. I work for my dad now. I’m looking into Boomerang for him. He’s thinking about becoming an investor.”
Alison’s father is an investment banker and he’s loaded. Big-time loaded. He makes Adam look like a pauper.
I know I should be considering what she’s saying strategically. I could bring Adam some inside intelligence. But all I can think is that I told this girl that I loved her.
What a fucking idiot. I didn’t love her. I loved the fun we had together. I loved the vacations we took. I loved having a girl that every guy wanted on my arm. And at the year mark, if you don’t say those words, something’s not right. Which it wasn’t. But I said them anyway. Now I wish I could take them back. The fact that I gave them to her so carelessly pisses me off.
A breeze sweeps past us. Alison’s shoulders give a small shiver. It’s a cool night, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything right now except the desire to leave.
“Ethan . . . I haven’t seen anyone since you.”
“I don’t care what you do, Alison. I stopped caring when I found you in bed with Carl.”
“Craig.”
“Don’t care.”
“I messed up. I know I did. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I draw in a deep breath and hold it, trying to let the rational part of my mind weigh in. What I want is for this to end, so I form an answer that will get me there.
“Okay, Alison. You said it. You can go on with a clear conscience now.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do. We spent two years together, Ethan. Most of it was amazing. If this is the way it ends for us, then we’re throwing away all that time. And I guess—I guess I want to see if we can salvage some of it. I don’t mean get back together. Not that I think we would—or that you’d consider it after what I did. But it’s like all that time never happened. And I don’t like the way it feels to regret so much.”
I’ve had the same thought a number of times. For a while, I was constantly having to edit my past to remove references to her. Anything could trigger a memory I didn’t want. The smell of cinnamon reminded me of the holidays with her—Alison always dusts her coffee with it. Other times it was Jason and Isis breaking off in the middle of a story—something the four of us had done together. Even flipping channels, seeing a glimpse of sport fishing, surfing, kayaking, reminded me of the trips I took with her family.
It hasn’t been as intense lately, since summer. Since Boomerang. Not by a long shot. But I do get what she’s saying. I know how it feels to want to erase your past so it’s not there for you to hate. What I’m not clear on is what she’s asking for.
“What do you want, Alison?” I ask. “For us to be friends? Is that it?”
Hope flickers in her blue eyes. “I don’t know, exactly. I’d like a chance to remake us. I screwed up, Ethan. And I guess I just don’t want to lose everything.”
Chapter 33
Mia
Q: What scares you?
Light blazes from every window of my parents’ house, and the front door stands wide open to the night. A sharp blast of adrenaline punches my solar plexus. I leap from the car and run toward the house without really knowing for sure that I stopped the car or turned off the engine.
“Nana?” I call as I cross the threshold and hurry through the front hall.
I rush through the house, calling to her, starting with her room, which looks as though it’s been ransacked. Bureau drawers are pulled out, some even onto the floor. Her closet stands open with piles of clothes puddled beneath pristine satin hangers. Books lie scattered on the floor, and I almost trip on an overturned teacup. But she’s not there. Nor is she in my mom’s studio, any of the three bathrooms, or in my pop’s workshop downstairs.
“Nana! Come on,” I call to her, opening and closing the doors of every guest room and of the darkened media space with its half-dozen plush leather recliners and wall-wide movie screen. Everything feels lifeless, empty. I shudder as I head outside through the back door. Foreboding weighs on me, slowing my steps, giving my movements a dreamy sluggish feel.
The palm trees circling the dark gar
den twinkle with ropes of fairy lights, but they hit me as cloying and artificial, not sexy and festive as they normally do.
I stand there in the hush of night and peer into the shadows, listening.
“Nana?” I whisper, and my voice lifts onto the suddenly stirring breeze. My throat pinches as I shift through the shadows, toward the edge of the property, which drops off steeply down to the canyon below.
A sound off to my left halts me. Branches cracking underfoot. I follow it, sprinting around the koi pond and squeezing through the narrow gap between two poplars to move around the side of the house.
There I find Nana wandering through the yard in her nightgown and robe. The satin sash dangles from a nearby bush, twisting in the evening breeze.
My relief makes me want to ball up and vomit. It also makes me want to punch something in the face.
“Nana, Jesus.” I rush across the lawn to her. “What are you doing?”
She doesn’t spare me a look, just keeps wandering across the yard, red hair glowing the color of blood in the hazy moonlight.
I’m late, I know, but my parents can’t have been gone for more than forty minutes. What happened here? How did she get in this state?
Gently, terrified of frightening her, I tug at the sleeve of her robe. “Nana?”
“Don’t just stand there,” she demands. “Help me find it.”
“Find what? What are you looking for?”
“That girl took all of them,” she mutters. “Every last one. She left me nothing.”
The girl again. I forgot to ask my parents, but now I’m really concerned. Could she have done that to my grandma’s room?
“What did she take, Nana?”
“All the prettiest ones,” she replies, and of course that doesn’t help.
Again, I think of the steep drop through tree branches and sharp rocks. I think of coyotes, out hungry and roaming in packs. Guilt and shame consume me, not because I leave most of the worrying to my parents but because a deep part of me, the selfish little girl inside me, wants to run away from this as fast as I can. But I don’t.
I touch my grandma’s shoulder gently but with enough pressure to bring her eyes around to me. They look small and fevered, birdlike and sunken into the wan skin surrounding them.
“It’s so dark out here, Nana,” I tell her. “Whatever you’re trying to find, we’ll have better luck in the morning.”
“But what if they’re gone by then? What if the girl takes them all and goes back on that train?”
Takes what? What train? I want to scream a million things at her, but I know she’s confused, that she’s overlaying events in her mind. She’s in a waking dream so much of the time now that it’s so hard to know what’s real.
I guide her back into the house where I help her get washed up and changed into a nightgown that doesn’t have dirt clinging to the hem. Then I bundle her into bed. In the dim light cast by her bedside table, we talk about her life as a young woman, meeting my grandfather, giving birth to my mother. I can’t save her, but I can offer her some touchstones on nights like these.
“I’ll find out where the girl put your things,” I tell her. “And we’ll get them back.” All the pretty things—whatever they may be.
I spend a little time reorganizing her room so she’s not frightened by its condition when she wakes in the morning. After straightening the house and switching off most of the lights, I bring her a cup of lavender tea and honey, but she falls asleep as soon as I set it on her ebony nightstand.
Her red hair coils in the hollow between her chin and shoulder, and there’s something coquettish about the way her face softens in sleep—but strong too. Like the face of Joan of Arc, if Joan fought her battles in Selma, Alabama, and 1960s Manhattan instead of Orleans, France.
I put a few more things away and then sneak from the room, leaving the door cracked open just an inch, the way I liked it when I was a kid. I turn out all the other lights on that side of the house but keep a dim hall light glowing in case she gets up and needs to find her way.
Finally, I sink into a kitchen chair and light the cluster of candles resting in a copper votive holder on the table. Their flames sputter and give off a plastic, chemical scent, but their three golden points warm me and help my bones unknot.
I put my head in my hands and tears come. Just a few. That boat feels farther away than ever, my nana the smallest speck on a gray horizon.
After a minute, I brush at my eyes. She’s still here, I remind myself. And with my camera, I have the power to hold her, to keep her with me in some form and share her with others.
That makes me think of Ethan. Before I know it, I’ve taken out my phone. It’s ridiculous, but I miss him. I want the connection. And I want to know what the hell happened at Pink Taco tonight. Who is that girl?
Mia: Hey, everything okay?
The candle flames shrink and stretch. Approximately sixty thousand minutes pass before his response appears.
Ethan: Define okay
No joke. No, “Hey, Curls.”
Mia: Umm. You’re safe, sound, and in one piece?
Ethan: Two out of three. No way I’m sound.
Mia: What’s going on?
Ethan: That girl tonight?
Mia: Yeah?
Ethan: That was Alison. My ex.
Suddenly, it’s like I’ve gone farsighted. I have to hold the phone out, concentrate really hard on the blue bubbles and the white type.
How is that even possible? How could I have scanned through dozens and dozens of profiles and found his freakin’ ex-girlfriend? What are the odds? It feels like it would be easier to go outside and be hit by a meteor.
Hysterical laughter bubbles up in me, but I pass my fingers through the candle flame a few times, looking for a little sting to settle me down, help me make sense of what absolutely defies sense.
My phone chimes.
Ethan: Still there, Curls?
Mia: Yeah. Wow. That’s crazy.
Ethan: Not as crazy as I feel right now.
Mia: Sorry. Should I call?
Ethan: Nah. I’m beat. Want to pretend it was all a bad dream. Or a bad joke. Which reminds me.
I wait, and when nothing more comes, I say:
Mia: ???
Ethan: I’m going to kill Cookie for pulling this shit on me.
Oh, crap.
I start typing an answer to Ethan, telling him that I switched his dates, that it wasn’t Cookie but me. But each time I try, it sounds crazy—like something a psycho jealous girlfriend would do. It doesn’t seem like me, and it sure doesn’t seem like something he’ll understand. At least not right now.
I’m on my fifteenth effort when another message comes through.
Ethan: I’m out. Doing breakfast with the ex, but get there early for the show. Cookie’s going down.
Mia: Don’t do anything crazy.
Which could mean either seeing his ex again—why would he do that?—or antagonizing Cookie, who didn’t have a thing to do with this. Both paths seem like bad, bad choices. And both paths seem like ones I’ve laid for him myself.
Chapter 34
Ethan
Q: Do you live more in the past, the present, or the future?
I manage maybe two hours of sleep, then I meet Alison for breakfast at John O’ Groats, where I push some food around while we both act like we can do this. Remake ourselves. Or whatever the fuck it is we’re doing.
Alison asks me about my parents and my brother. She asks about the Dynamos and Jason and Isis. She chips away, getting me to talk about the people and things I care about until I start to relax in spite of myself.
Then she asks about Boomerang.
“What’s Adam Blackwood like?”
“Mixing in a little work, Alison?”
She smiles, a little guiltily. “I was just curious. Dad’s trying to get a read on him.” She takes a sip of her latte—dusted with cinnamon—and picks at her egg-white omelet. “Do you like working there?”
“Yeah, I do. I’ve met some really good people.”
My mind does a stop and pivot, suddenly one hundred percent focused on Mia. On her green eyes and sweet smile. The way she felt the night I kissed her in her mother’s studio. She was so responsive, so turned on. I want that again. I need that.
Alison must sense that I’m distracted because her eyes narrow on me, then take on a resigned sadness. She looks down at her latte. “It means a lot to me that you’re here, Ethan.”
“I almost blew it off.”
“I probably would have if our situation was reversed.”
“Maybe not,” I say. “Give yourself a little credit.”
She continues to stare at her coffee, but her eyes begin to fill with tears, which shocks me. Prior to this Remaking Us campaign, I’ve only seen her cry once, when her horse, Zenith, broke a leg and had to be put down. I pull a napkin out of the holder and hand it to her, flashing back on Raylene. This is starting to become a habit for me.
“Thanks.” Alison takes it, but she tucks it beneath her plate. She’s already gotten herself under control again. No hour-long cry for her.
“How’s your mom?” I ask, because it feels like I should.
She looks up and pastes on a smile. “Oh, you know. Raising millions of dollars for charity. Doing lunch. Getting Botox. The usual.”
Her mom is a piece of work. She’s the most self-absorbed human being I’ve ever known. I don’t know what to say next, but I’m saved when her phone buzzes.
“It’s my dad,” Alison says, fishing it out of her purse and declining the call. “I told him I was seeing you this morning.”
Okay. This is awkward. “Tell him I said hi.”
“You know him. That’s not going to cut it. He’ll ask me a hundred questions about you, then decide to call you himself. He wanted to call you weeks ago when we—ended. I swear, he almost disowned me. He misses you.”
I smile, because the idea of her dad missing anything except making money is hard to imagine. He’s a shrewd entrepreneur like Adam, but where Adam seems to have fun in business, Alison’s father is ruthless. Graham Quick and I have nothing in common, which makes me both nonthreatening and interesting to him. Plenty of times on trips it felt like he wanted to spend more time with me than with Alison.
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