by Sarah Archer
Kelly had always heard legends of the natural opportunities afforded to residents of the San Francisco Bay Area where she had been born and bred. She had always been indoorsy herself, but supposedly there was this thing called the beach? Maybe some mountains? Despite having lived there her entire life, Kelly had to make heavy use of TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, and WebMD to plan a day of outdoor activities in her own hometown. She would be her own judge of this “fresh air” thing.
“I didn’t realize you liked the beach,” Ethan mused as Kelly finally found parking. “Why haven’t we gone more often?”
“You’ll see once I bring out the sunscreen,” she said.
Ethan spent a good ten minutes coating every inch and crevice Kelly didn’t even know she had with an SPF higher than her credit score. Even with a water shirt on to cover his back panel, Ethan attracted some stares from other beachgoers, male and female, as he set up shop, arranging their towels and beach bag, while Kelly rubbed on some high-SPF lip balm, just in case. Then they stared at each other.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“I think we . . . go in.”
Ethan mimicked her cautious pace as he followed her into the water, an inch at a time. Kelly hadn’t done this in years. The face-numbing cold instantly reminded her why. But her flesh started to unfreeze as she forced herself to stay under, wading around a little. Actually, it was kind of nice.
“Are you having fun?” Ethan asked.
“Yeah, I am.”
“Are you all right? Do you need more sunscreen? I can go back and get it.” He made as if to return to shore, but she pulled him back.
“Stop, I’m fine. Just stay out here with me.”
Kelly looked out across the stripes of water undulating toward them, one after another, almost musical in their rhythmic succession. But Ethan was looking at her. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Your hair—”
“What? Oh.” She fingered her hair; she could feel its natural waves returning in the sea spray. “I’ll straighten it out again later, it can’t be helped right now.”
“No.” He reached out and stroked it gently. “This is good.”
There was something about being surrounded on all sides by ocean water, supported by it, that made everything else feel impossibly far away. San Jose became Atlantis. The fluorescent-lit offices of AHI were a legend unconfirmed. The orange light of happiness melted all the way to Kelly’s toes. She flicked the water playfully at Ethan and he laughed, splashing her back.
That afternoon they went hiking, or struggle-walking in Kelly’s case, in the rolling foothills near Mount Hamilton. Ethan let her lead the precarious way up a path winding along the side of a steep hill, the air tingling with the smells of clean, fine-grained dirt and silvery desert plants. Kelly was starting to regret this choice—her calves were not used to exercise that didn’t involve getting into or out of a chair—but she pushed forward. They emerged onto an overlook.
Seldom was the sound of traffic so far off—it was more of a hum here, a feeling rather than a noise. A panorama of red hills, spotted with tough shrubs and spiky, geometric growths, stretched from horizon to horizon, the peaks dipping toward and away from each other like waves frozen at their crest. It had been a long time since she had seen something so still.
“Isn’t it beautiful?”
“It is beautiful,” Ethan said. “Thank you for taking me with you here.”
“You don’t need to thank me.” Kelly looked around, letting herself sink into the moment. She looked at Ethan. “Aren’t you happy here?”
He smiled at her. “I am if you are.”
What would her life be like after Ethan? In her first twenty-nine years, she had never found anything close to the intimacy she had with him. He was literally her perfect match. He picked up on her every desire and molded himself after it. But was making someone who became perfect for her the same as finding her perfect person? She thought back to all her hours of research on the health impacts of loneliness—the shorter life span, the dementia, the depression. She knew that finding love was challenging. She knew that she herself was not an easy person to love. She could imagine a version of herself going between her home and office, day in, day out, for years, until she could no longer go anywhere but home, living out her days on her own. Loneliness was a real and heavy threat. But was it enough to be with someone who molded himself after her desires? How could she know if he had any true desires of his own? Was it enough to be with someone if she wasn’t sure if he was . . . someone?
Kelly tried to shake off the thoughts clogging her brain and just enjoy the moment. She turned from the view to search Ethan’s face. But it was impossible to tell if the happiness on his face was more than a reflection of her own.
* * *
• • •
As the next week went on, it was easy enough for Kelly to push her decision about Ethan to the side. There were too many other demands on her attention at work, including those from Robbie. But when the weekend came, what should have been a pleasant, freeing emptiness just meant a lack of excuses. And so, on a sunny April Saturday, while Ethan did laundry in the next room, she slid into the computer chair at her home desk, a mug of coffee in hand, and opened a blank document. She needed to get organized, to make a plan. Writing out what she needed to do in logical, discrete steps might make the daunting process seem possible. “Complete step one” was much friendlier than “Kill your fiancé.”
An hour later, she felt much better. She had her plan written out and pinned to the background of her phone. The list was neat, precise, and orderly, and she was right on schedule with Item A: the mother.
She had decided to give the “tell Mom that Ethan is moving away” tactic one more try. She straightened her shoulders within her pressed white button-down and breathed in through her nose before pushing open the boutique’s door—an astringent, cleansing breath.
As soon as she entered her mother’s shop, she felt out of sorts—the place always had that effect. But Kelly would not let that deter her. She was maintaining a clean mind. She was on a mission. Just like that time she had come here determined to tell her mom that Ethan was history and instead ended up with a fiancé. But she shoved the thought away—this time would be different. This time had to be different.
Her mother wasn’t in the front area, but Kelly thought she heard a rustling in the back. She pushed past the pink-flowered curtain and saw Diane, back toward her, in the workshop, a small, square space cluttered with an impossible variety of fabrics, threads, and notions in a veritable rainbow of white.
“Hey, Mom,” she said.
Diane turned, surprised. “Kelly! I didn’t know you were coming over. What a nice surprise! You never just drop in. Is everything okay? You should have warned me.” She edged in front of whatever she had been working on, blocking Kelly’s view, fidgeting a bit.
Kelly focused herself with another cleansing breath and got straight to the point, in accordance with her plan. “There’s something I need to tell you about Ethan,” she began.
But Diane wasn’t listening, still moving nervously, swishing some fabric behind her, which she seemed half determined to hide and half eager to show. “I wish I had known you were coming—it’s really not ready for you to see yet. A lot of it is still just tacked in.”
“What is?”
“Your dress.”
“That’s okay, I don’t need to see it anyway, I need to tell you something.” The last thing Kelly wanted right now was to have to find something nice to say about a dress that looked like a Pomeranian with a growth-inducing gland disorder.
But Diane didn’t seem able to contain herself any longer. She moved aside. “What do you think?”
At first Kelly wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Where was the solid shell of blinding crystals? Where was the giant skirt? Could it not fit in the room? Was this the slip
? But the dress she was looking at was actually . . . lovely. It was as if Kelly, who had never in her life pictured what type of wedding dress she might like, was suddenly seeing the exact dress she’d dreamed of all along. Soft, ivory silk flowed from the modest straps into a lightly fitted bodice and then a trailing skirt. The V-neck and dipping back were complemented with delicate pearls. It was a bit flowier, a bit dreamier, than any garment Kelly typically found herself drawn to. Yet somehow, it was just right. When Kelly looked at the dress, she forgot entirely why she had come into the shop that day. All she could imagine was herself, in that dress, walking down the aisle toward Ethan.
“Well?” her mom asked anxiously. “I know it’s simpler than what I usually design, but it just seemed like—you.” And Kelly was amazed to see that her mother knew exactly who that “you” was.
“It’s perfect,” Kelly breathed.
* * *
• • •
Diane must have pumped some sort of brain-addling chemical through the vents of that godforsaken shop to impair all decision making. That was the only explanation for why Kelly had done this yet again. And for how her mom got women to spend fifty dollars on a garter belt. That night, she was back in her room, ostensibly writing the investor dossier for Confibot. But her eyes kept going out of focus as she stared at the screen. All she could think about was how she had landed herself back in the same boat with Ethan yet again—a boat that was unmoored, directionless, and about as seaworthy as a sieve. Her brain knew that she shouldn’t keep Ethan; it was why she had gone to see her mother in the first place. But her heart was still refusing to listen.
Ethan knocked lightly on the open door, awakening her from gazing blankly at the computer, which had blinked into sleep mode. “Want me to start dinner?” he asked. “I’m assuming you want to stay in tonight and work.”
“Yeah, sure,” she said absently.
“Is everything all right?”
She waited a moment before replying, her eyes still raking the screen. “I got into a fight with Priya,” she began slowly. She still hadn’t told him. Scrunching the whole business back into the corners of her brain made it so much easier to deal with.
“Over what?” He came and sat on the edge of the bed as she rotated her chair to face him.
“Over—” She had been about to say “Over you,” but a sense of delicacy held her back. “Just work stuff,” she continued. “She was supposed to show up for something for me and didn’t. I mean, I guess she’s asked me to do stuff too and I haven’t. I’ve been so busy, I’ve kind of been in my own world.”
“You work so hard,” Ethan said consolingly. “It’s remarkable you can make time for anyone else at all.”
“Yeah, but I haven’t been making enough time for work, either. I’m falling behind with Confibot.”
“I have some great articles on productivity I could read to you. There’s one about structuring your day in triangles to achieve maximum efficiency; it’s fascinating—”
Kelly waved him off. “I don’t have time to read articles on saving time. What would really gain me some time is if I could get my mom to back off with the wedding planning stuff, but I feel like I’ve already been kind of rough on her lately, and she is doing a lot. She’s only trying to help.”
“And you’re only trying to take care of the things you need to take care of,” Ethan responded sagely.
“But that’s not how my mom sees it,” Kelly insisted. “Not everyone is as nice and as reasonable as you. Pretty much no one is.”
“You are.”
“No, I’m not!” Kelly wasn’t sure why she felt such a need to make him understand this. His compliments weren’t helping. No matter how sincerely he believed them, she knew that they weren’t true. She had always felt that Ethan understood her more than anyone, that she could show him sides of herself that she normally hid away. He knew her as well as she knew herself. But maybe that was the problem. His ability to judge her came from her. As innately rational as he was, he was still predisposed, more and more as time went on and he was around her, to understand her perspective and support it no matter what. She began to wonder if she would ever be able to grow in a relationship with someone who was so close to her. There was a fine line between closeness and being closed in.
“You’re too hard on yourself.” He reached out and smoothed her hair; she caught his wrist affectionately as his hand came to rest in the nape of her neck.
“Why don’t you get started on dinner? I’ll join you in a minute,” she said quietly.
When Ethan left for the kitchen, she softly pushed the door until it was almost closed, picked her phone up from the desk, and retreated back to the far side of the room. There was no good reason why Ethan shouldn’t hear her conversation. Still, she felt sensitive about it.
“How did the farmer find his sheep in the tall grass?” Gary asked as soon as he picked up the phone. He waited a long beat for Kelly to say something, but she didn’t, so he went on, finishing emphatically: “Satisfying.” He guffawed, but Kelly didn’t laugh. “Kelly? Are you even there?”
“I’m here,” she answered.
“No laugh? Tough room.”
“I’m just not in a joking mood,” she said, plucking at the hem of her shirt.
“What’s the matter?”
Now she laughed, a dry, sarcastic laugh. “What isn’t?” And she found herself spilling out everything—almost everything. She didn’t tell her brother the truth about Ethan, but she detailed her stress over the wedding and her work troubles, all the way back to Dr. Masden’s evisceration of her all those months ago. The more she talked about her worries, about how much she had left to do on Confibot, and how stuck she felt with the project, the more overwhelmed she became. By the end, she was nearly breathless. “Anyway, I know you can’t do anything about any of this, and you’ve got enough of your own stuff going on,” she hurried on, “but I just kind of wanted to vent. I haven’t really had anyone to talk to about all this.”
“You haven’t talked to Ethan? Or Priya?”
“Priya and I, um, had a fight,” she confessed. She carefully avoided addressing Ethan.
“So? I know her well enough to know that she’d still want to help you, even if you had some kind of fight. I can’t tell you how to make a robot, but she can. Just ask for her opinion.”
“I’m telling you, she’s not going to want to help me right now.”
“Have you tried? Or are you too proud to ask?”
“What are you talking about? I’m not too proud to ask for help.”
“You’re not even willing to take my help right now.” A silence fell after Gary’s words. Kelly could hear the bright, metallic tones of a Baby Einstein video in the background before he started speaking again. “I’m just saying, not to minimize your problems, but I think you’re making things harder for yourself. You’ve got a great brain, but you need to get out of it sometimes. Honestly, Kelly, it sounds like the psychologist guy acted like an a-hole, but that he wasn’t that wrong—about the robot or about you.”
Kelly was fed up with people questioning her choices—Dr. Masden, Priya, Anita, Gary. If one more person questioned her thinking, she would—she would—she might just believe them. She glanced at the cracked bedroom door, Ethan on the other side. The conversation with him had been so much easier than this. But it felt hollow in comparison. Gary’s words had weight. They sunk into the skin.
“I do appreciate your help,” she said finally. “I’m listening. Thank you for listening.”
“You know I’m here whenever you need to vent. There is no ‘I’ in ‘brother.’”
“True, yet also completely irrelevant.”
“All I’m saying is, you don’t have to do this alone. By the way, have you talked to Clara recently?”
“Umm—no, I guess not.” Kelly searched her memory. She couldn’t remember the
last time she and Clara had spoken. Her sister had missed the last family dinner. Kelly had noted the absence as uncharacteristic, but had been so wrapped up in her own worries that she hadn’t dwelt on it.
“She just sounded off when we talked last week.”
“I’ll text her,” Kelly promised. When she got off the phone, she shot Clara a text to check in, then chucked the phone down on the bed. But something stopped her. She turned around, picked the phone back up, opened her contacts, then froze. She really didn’t know if she could make this call.
She was a grown-ass woman. She could make this call.
“Hi, Dr. Masden,” she said when he picked up. “I really need your help.”
twenty-four
• • • • • •
“What do you think Confibot should be?” Kelly was seated opposite Dr. Masden in the control room, sharing the same set of chairs in which she and Anita had had their come-to-Jesus. She was almost as nervous now. And she wasn’t even thinking about the rakish way his hair fell over his forehead, or how close he was sitting to her, or the fact that there was a patch of hair on her knee that she’d missed every time she shaved for the past month. She was nervous because she knew that he could respond in literally any way to her question, and that if he responded in a way she didn’t like, she would not be able to simply veto his ideas in the wake of everything that had gone down between them. She couldn’t control what he was about to say, but she would be forced to give it a chance.
But he simply raised a skeptical brow. “Are you sure you want to know?”
“I’m asking, aren’t I?”
“It’s just that we didn’t exactly leave on a positive note last time. I got the impression you never wanted to see me again.” He ran a hand wearily through his black hair. “I really couldn’t blame you. I’ve regretted what I said to you since then. It was rude, it was unprofessional—”
“Which is exactly what I was,” Kelly broke in. “And I am sorry. I called you here to ask for your opinion, right? Isn’t that enough to prove that I mean it?”