by R. S. Elliot
Well, most things. Things between Luke and I were not normal, or at least I felt like they weren’t. We hadn’t even had time to find our equilibrium before we were wrenched apart, but maybe that was all for the best. Still, that pain in my chest came back every time I thought about it, and sometimes I would just start crying in the shower or on the subway for no good reason. I felt cheated out of what could have been the best thing to ever happen to me. I thought about calling my mother maybe ten times, but each time I chickened out and put the phone down. I didn’t want to have to explain myself to her, and I was so afraid she was going to be disappointed with me after the little speech she gave me about keeping it professional with my coworkers.
I ended up breaking down on a Thursday afternoon when I overheard Olivia talking to Sonia about Luke’s schedule in the lunchroom.
“He’ll be out of the office tomorrow,” she said. She was looking a little better than she had the week prior, with her hair swept back into an elegant chignon and her face immaculately made up, but she still seemed tired, like she needed a whole week away from the demands of work to recharge. People always looked at the insanely high workload and output of SkyBlue and immediately thought of Luke, but Olivia took on just as much as him, and she also took on his well-being. “But if you leave the paperwork with me, I can get it approved first thing next week.”
“I appreciate it. Where’s he going to be again? Another speaking thing?”
I stiffened a bit where I was standing next to the electric kettle and nearly splashed hot water out of my mug and onto my feet. I did my best not to show my surprise and snagged a paper towel from the rack to mop up the tiny puddle I made. My hands were shaking.
“Near Long Island, yeah,” Olivia went on. “Some tech incubator event, I can’t keep it all straight.”
They noticed my presence then, maybe just from the waves of anxiety and grief I was radiating. Oliva ducked her head in guilt, worrying at her fingernail with her teeth as though that could hide what she knew, and what she had just let spill in front of me. Sonia gave me a sympathetic smile, but it was too late. I knew.
Luke had been invited to speak at another event and he hadn’t invited me along as his photographer. I don’t know what I expected, since our last session had ended so catastrophically and the photos from San Francisco were still languishing on the memory card of my Nikon, but it stung all the same.
I rushed out of the kitchen before either woman could see my tears or try to pull me into conversation, then I swept my personal items into my purse from my desk and clocked out early. I needed my mother, and my sister. I was a grown woman and should be able to handle this by myself, and I should have listened when my mom took the phone away from Darlene and told me to watch my back and my heart while I was on the job. But I couldn’t do this alone anymore.
My mother looked genuinely surprised when she opened her front door to find me standing on her stoop. I didn’t know if she would be working at the hotel or if Darlene would even be home from art club. Mom had been taking on more and more hours at the hotel since my father died, especially with Darlene becoming more independent as she grew older. I knew that we all had our ways of escaping from the pain of my dad’s passing: my mother overworked, Darlene threw herself into her hobbies and I… well, I had just followed the plan my father and I had laid out for me to the letter, except for the part where I fell into bed with a man thirteen years older than me and nearly ruined both our careers in the process. Now I had come full circle and was standing with a tear-streaked face in front of my childhood home, the home where I had grown up and where my father and I had discussed so many of his dreams for me. I was sure that in the wildest stretch of his imagination he had never considered this.
“Mom,” I said hoarsely, even though I promised myself I would explain myself rationally, and I had promised myself I wouldn’t cry. I was terrified of being scolded, so worried that she would hear about the trouble I had gotten into and give me a piece of her mind, and chide me for skipping out on work while she was at it.
But my mother looked down at me with the softest, most concerned look in her eyes.
“Bunny? Are you alright?”
I burst into tears on the spot, and my mother enfolded me in her arms and pulled me into the house without question. Everything was just as I remembered it; the slightly cramped seventies style entryway, the open kitchen and living room/den combo stuffed with beaten-up couches, cozy leather armchairs, and the flat screen TV my father had insisted we couldn’t live without. The living room had been his realm when he was still alive, subject to his questionable decorating taste, but no one in the family had the heart to redecorate after he died. As a matter of fact, I realized that my mother had changed almost nothing in the house since he died, certainly not the rooms he spent the most time in, and I wondered if we all were just trying to go on like he had never left us, like he had just stepped out for a six pack of cola and some ice and would be back in time for dinner.
Darlene was already in the living room, curled up in an armchair with her tablet resting on her knee. She was a better artist than I had ever been even though she couldn’t take a picture to save her life, and as she had grown, coloring books had given way to sketch pads and paint canvases and electronic tablets where she could draw and shape and stipple to her heart’s content. My mother could complain about her antisocial habits all she wanted, but we both knew that art was Darlene’s most precious and valuable outlet, the thing that kept her from completely losing it when my dad died. It was hard enough to be a teenage girl without a death in the family, and if spending hours a day hunched over her tablet, stylus pen in hand, was what made her feel complete and balanced, so be it.
“Em!” Darlene exclaimed. “Since when were you supposed to come to visit?”
“Since now,” I said miserably, sinking down onto the lumpy cushions that I had bounced on as a toddler and curled up on with friends for middle school ice cream and pizza-filled movie marathons. Just being back in this house made me want to keep crying and never stop.
My mother drifted into the living room after me, looking mildly distraught in her pressed grey denim shirt and jeans with her hair tied up in a handkerchief. If I had to guess, I would say I caught her in the middle of one of her cleaning sprees, which was usually how she spent the few days she had off work. I could practically see her fluttering around the house with a mop and a feather duster, doing her damndest to get Darlene to help out or vacuuming under her chair while she drew and sulked. It was a familiar scene, one that I had spent my high school days wedged right in the middle of, scrubbing dishes or getting distracted while “cleaning” my room by all the beloved old books I found. It was how we spent many of our days off together, filling our time with chores so we didn’t have to spend too much time talking to each other. It wasn’t that we didn’t like each other. It was just that we had virtually nothing in common and therefore, not much to talk about outside of the half hour we spent having a family dinner every night at six pm on the dot, because my mother insisted, and because it had been my father’s favorite ritual.
Now my mother came to sit beside me and covered my hand with her own. She smelled like citrus all-purpose cleaner, and face powder, and fresh laundry.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart? You look like you’ve been through hell and back.”
“I feel that way,” I said. Then I realized that I might alarm her more than was entirely necessary. “I’m okay, though! I’m in one piece. No eviction notice or lost job or broken bones just…”
“A broken heart?” My mother hazarded.
This broke down the last few walls I had against letting her in. I told them both everything. About the carjacking, about Luke, about the job and all the after-hours meetings I had been pulled into. And did it sitting on the couch, crying into a napkin my mother had pulled out of her pocket. Darlene, to her credit, was a good listener. She didn’t roll her eyes or interject herself, and she occasionally glanced up
from her tablet to take in more of my story.
“This is so wild,” she said when I paused for breath. “I can’t believe you seriously were running around with the CEO of your company, boinking after hours.”
“Darlene!” My mother said firmly. “Don’t be crass.”
“She just told us she did!”
“Darlene I could use a little support right now,” I said, my face hot and swollen from crying. I was so tired of crying and was ready to not shed another tear for the rest of the year. Darlene made an irritated noise and went back to shading in some contour on the face of whatever celebrity or book character she was drawing. Darlene would get fixated on faces, or hands or silhouettes, and draw them again and again until she got them perfectly right. Her room was a weird assemblage of body parts hanging from the walls, printed on glossy print paper or sketched hastily onto napkins, notebook paper, or graph paper. She collected more body parts than your average serial killer, I thought.
“Emily,” my mother began carefully, setting down her glass of iced tea on the living room table. She had insisted on bringing out tea for us all while I told my story, maybe because she thought it would make me feel better. Probably so she would have something to do with her hands. She always had something in the fridge ready to offer guests because she had long ago found it would prevent them from loitering in the entryway, unsure of what to say.
“I’m so sorry you’re upset but this… I just never expected you to get caught up in something like this. Now I’m not judging you—"
“I’m feeling judged.”
“Welcome to my world,” Darlene muttered.
“Just listen to me,” my mother went on. “You know how important this internship is to you and I’m sure that man is charming and good looking and all sorts of things but… you know this constitutes a violation of ethics, right? You could get in big trouble for this. And God, those pictures…”
“He was the one who kissed me, how was I supposed to know that there were cameras all around?”
“You take pictures for a living, Bunny, I’m sure you could have figured it out.”
I immediately regretted telling her about the photographs, but I didn’t know how to drive home the severity of what had happened without revealing them. Darlene had done me the courtesy of pretending like she hadn’t seen the photos when I brought them up. She even raised her eyebrows in mock surprise, but I had seen her scrolling through her phone moments before, probably flipping back through snapshots of the evidence exchanged with friends. I didn’t blame her. If something had caught my sister locking lips with one of the most eligible bachelors in New York City, I would want first dibs on that gossip too. I’m sure it was one of the most interesting things to happen to anyone she knew in this sleepy New Jersey suburb where nothing ever happened except for the occasional convenience store robbery or local investment banker going to jail for embezzling company funds. We seemed to have a lot of those in our neighborhood, and the occasional trials had livened up long, boring summers between my long, boring school years.
“I won’t let myself feel bad for just existing in public. Who do those people think they are, anyway? Poking their nose in private business between two consenting adults. He should sue them.”
“Luke’s a public figure. When you get as famous as he is, there isn’t any private life anymore. Come on Emily, you should know this. Didn’t you take all those communications law and media relations classes your first year? How is it that I know more about libel than you?”
“I know what libel is, Mom, and I know this isn’t it. I was just being dramatic.”
As good as it was to be back home being doted on by my mother, there were part of her attentions that I would have been just fine without. No matter how much she tried to frame it as something else, her worrying did feel judgmental, like she had never made a mistake in her youth that she could remember now.
“I’m trying to do the right thing,” I groaned. “But I’m so miserable in that office now. I’m just counting down the days until this internship is over, I want to quit, I want to do something else.”
“If you quit, you’ll have to find another summer internship and there’s no way that’s happening,” Darlene said, brutally honest as ever. “Especially if you can’t get a good letter of rec from someone at that company. Sorry sis.”
“Think of your future,” my mother urged. “Think of Paris. You have to be more responsible.”
“I am thinking of my future! I just don’t know how to—"
My phone vibrated insistently on the table, and I snatched it up in irritation. A worried phone call from Joanna or a snippy email reminder to register for my fall classes was the last thing I wanted right now, and I had half a mind to snap at whoever was unlucky enough to catch me in this mood.
To my shock, it was Olivia. All the anger melted out of my system, replaced by pure unbridled terror. Oh God, what could she want? Had she found out something more? I felt so very, very tired.
I wiped the tears from my face and stood, already moving into the hallway. Privacy. I needed privacy.
“I’m sorry, I need to take this, just one minute…”
“Bunny, who is it?”
“Just a sec, Mom, please, I just need to—"
“Let her go,” Darlene said. “Maybe it’s the guy.”
I lingered in the half-darkened hallway and put the phone to my ear, asking quietly,
“Hello?”
“Emily, it’s Olivia.”
Her voice sounded weighted on the other end. I knew she must have spent the last few hours at the funeral, one of the few people in Luke’s inner circle to be invited.
“Is something wrong?” I asked immediately.
“Don’t worry, this isn’t about work. Can I talk to you for a few minutes? Are you alone?”
I glanced over my shoulder at my mother and Darlene, still murmuring among themselves in the hallway.
“Sure, one minute.”
Moving by instinct in the dark, I let myself into my childhood bedroom, long-since renovated into a combination home office and guest bedroom. I sagged down onto the creaking mattress, feeling like I couldn’t trust my legs.
“Go ahead.”
“I’m sure the last week has been hell for you. How have you been?”
I wasn’t expecting this personal line of questioning, or the softness in her voice when she led me down it.
“Oh, um… I’m hanging in there. It’s alright. Surreal, but alright. No one at work has been awful to me or anything so that’s good. My, um, my family did find out. So that was a conversation.”
“I’m sure. Are you with them now?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’m glad you were able to get out of the city and take a break. Listen, I want to talk to you about Luke.”
My throat tightened instinctively. I was sure that Olivia had found time to question him about us, probably to agree with him that I was a bad influence and a distraction that should be kept out his life. Maybe this was the call to put me in my place, to drive home the fact that I was not welcome in his life.
“Okay, I’m listening.”
“I’ve known Luke since we were kids, barely eighteen together at college. He’s always been incredibly dedicated to his passions and to the people he cares about, and I’ve been lucky enough to be in that sphere for some time now. I know him just as well as Carl or anyone else. And I know what his patterns are like.”
I swallowed hard. I didn’t think I could handle hearing about all the other girls Luke had bedded and dropped in a fit of stress, if that’s where this conversation was going.
“Luke is… He’s a very intelligent man, but he’s stupid where it counts. Do you know what I’m trying to tell you?”
“Not really,” I admitted.
Olivia sighed on the other end, and I realized she must be pacing a room. Was she still at the funeral, maybe tucked into some private chamber of the funeral home?
“Luke’
s gut instinct when something goes wrong is to withdraw and bury himself in his work. He’s like an emu. I’ve seen him wreck friendships doing that and alienate his own family. I knew it was only a matter of time before some poor girl got caught in the crossfire, and I’m sorry it had to be you.”
“Oh. Well. Thank you, I guess.”
“I’ve been with him all day. I don’t have to tell you he’s really fucked up about his dad, but you know he’ll never admit that. I’ve been with him all day. I can tell he feels rotten about how things ended with you, and when I tried to ask him about it he looked so miserable you would have thought I kicked his puppy. He would never admit this to you himself, and he would be furious with me for saying so… but he cares about you, Emily. That’s so glaringly obvious to everyone else. And he needs you.”
My heart fluttered in my chest, and I thought it might burst right then and there from shock and excitement.
“Are you serious?” I breathed. “But he said—"
“I know what he said. Luke’s an emotionally repressed dumbass, but he’s getting better. And no one is very emotionally articulate when they’re staring down deadlines and planning a funeral.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Listen, I’m not going to tell you to come out here. Everyone’s had a long day but if you still were interested in him and you felt up to it—"
“Definitely,” I said, before she had even finished. “Yes.”
“I hoped you would say that.”
“But I thought… That you didn’t approve of… Well, Luke and I.”
Olivia sighed on the other end and for a moment there was silence. My heart hammered in my chest. I was terrified that I had offended her, or had invited her to have second thoughts.
“I’m not overly fond of workplace romances myself but I know that sometimes, you just meet someone and it happens. I didn’t know where this was going at first or what it was going to do to Luke, but now I see that you’re a net positive in his life. And he could take very good care of you, Emily. He’s incredibly attentive and generous when he’s found someone he likes. I think I’d like to see that for both of you.”