9 Days and 9 Nights

by Katie Cotugno

  Still, through the soupy haze of hysteria in my brain I can’t deny the delicious lick of something unexpected, the opening chords of a song I haven’t heard in a very long time. It occurs to me that even after everything that happened, I’ve been waiting to see Gabe again since the day I said good-bye to him last summer.

  “We definitely don’t want to put anybody out,” Sadie promises. She looks completely and obviously enamored by the idea of coming along, her pretty face lit up like her veins are full of neon. “But that sounds amazing, actually. Like, assuming you guys are for real and this isn’t just a politeness offer, and we’re not messing up your romantic vacation or anything like that.” She looks at Gabe. “Isn’t that the point of a backpacking trip?” she asks, sounding almost beseeching. “Like, going wherever the whim takes you?”

  “Kuddelmuddel!” Ian bursts out like a contestant on a game show who knows he’s got the winning answer. He looks to me for confirmation. “Right?”

  Gabe’s eyes narrow. “What?”

  I shake my head. “Forget it.”

  For the first time all night, Gabe looks directly across the table at me. What are you doing? his expression seems to beg. After all, I could still save us; it wouldn’t even take that much. I could weave a thousand excuses. I could tip my hand and tell the truth.

  But I don’t.

  “It’s a real invitation, dude,” Ian declares, sitting back in the booth, his long limbs everywhere like he doesn’t have a care in the breathing world. “We wouldn’t ask if we didn’t mean it.”

  “Ryanair flights are like thirty bucks right now,” Sadie puts in. “Or thirty euro, but still. I was looking today,” she explains, off Gabe’s quizzical expression. “I thought we couldn’t make it work ’cause we’d still have to pay for a hotel and car rental and all that stuff, but if we have a place to stay . . .” She mirrors his wide-eyed stare. “Oh, come on,” she cajoles, hooking her arm around his and resting her sharp chin on his shoulder. “It’ll be an adventure.”

  “An adventure, huh?” Gabe asks, lips twisting. But then, to my utter surprise, he nods. “Okay,” he says slowly, like he knows he’s outnumbered. “Fuck it. Why not, right? Let’s go.”

  “Sweet!” Ian is grinning. “Glad to have you aboard, kids.”

  “To Ireland,” Sadie says, raising her pint glass. “And new friends.”

  The rest of us raise our beers in a sloppy cheers, giddy; beer sloshes down my wrist as we clink. I look everywhere but at Gabe as the band starts up again, grateful that the music is too loud to think about what might happen next.

  Day 3

  “Wake up, Drunky Brewster,” Ian says the next morning, nudging me with one gentle knee and waving a paper cup of weak British coffee in front of my face. “We gotta go meet your friends at the airport.”

  I shake my head into the sheets. “What?” I mumble. My head is pounding, my stomach gurgling from all the beer we drank last night; for a second I’m completely disoriented. Then I remember:

  Gabe. Sadie.

  Ireland.

  Oh my God, what have I done?

  I scramble upright, head clearing as suddenly as if I’d fallen through thin ice into Star Lake in January. “Why did you do that?” I demand, trying not to sound too ear-splittingly shrill and knowing I’m missing by several octaves at least. “Just invite those guys to Imogen’s last night without asking me first?”

  “Wait, what?” Ian sets the coffee down on the nightstand, blinks at me. “Really? You’re mad at me now? Last night you were totally into the idea.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” I tell him, though I know I can’t actually blame him for assuming otherwise. I wanted so badly to convince him that everything was fine, and I overshot so hard that for a second I even managed to convince myself it was a good idea. “It’s just, it’s weird.”

  “Why is it weird?” Ian asks. “They’re your friends. Or he is, at least. Isn’t he?”

  “No,” I amend, “I mean, he is, but it just feels like an imposition on Imogen, and it wasn’t part of our plan, and—” I break off, huffing a breath out. I can’t believe I let him do that. I can’t believe I let myself.

  “Do you want to uninvite them?” Ian asks finally, sitting down on the edge of the mattress and looking faintly crestfallen. “You can just text them, right? Say you got some kind of rare European fever and the whole thing is canceled.”

  I smile in spite of myself, shake my head. “No,” I say. “That just makes it weirder.” I sigh, scrub my hands through my unwashed hair. “I’m sorry. I’m being a control freak.”

  “Something new for a change,” Ian jokes, but there’s a faint edge to his voice. I tuck my hair behind my ears, and just like that I’m my normal self again, bright and unruffled.

  “You’re right,” I tell him. “I’m being ridiculous. It’ll be fun. The more the merrier, right?” I lean over and stamp a deranged kiss on his face before hopping out of bed and trotting toward the bathroom. “Good morning, PS. I’ll call Imogen and let her know.”

  I shut the bathroom door and turn the water on, then scroll through the favorites on my phone until I find the number for Imogen’s international cell. “It’s you!” she says when she answers. “What’s the matter?”

  “What makes you think something is the matter?” I ask, sitting down on the cool tile floor and stretching my legs out in front of me.

  Imogen laughs. “If nothing was the matter, you would have texted. You guys are still coming, right?”

  “No no no, absolutely!” I promise. “Yes. There’s just, like. A tiny wrinkle.” I rest my head against the doorjamb, try to think how best to begin. “So, first of all, guess who’s in London.”

  I explain the whole night as quickly and factually as possible, leaving out the part where seeing Gabe again set every cell in my skeleton humming like a juiced-up power grid and ending with Ian being Ian and inviting them to tag along. Once I’m finished, Imogen is silent for a moment. “So you’re bringing Gabe and his new girlfriend to my nun house today?” she asks. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Um,” I say sheepishly, squeezing my eyes shut. My head really hurts. “Yes? I’m sorry. I know it’s a massive imposition, you can definitely tell me to go screw, I—”

  “No, it’s not that,” Imogen interrupts. “Come on, I don’t care about that. I just . . .” She trails off, the question hanging thick as London fog in the silence.

  “I didn’t tell him,” I blurt. “I know that’s what you’re thinking, and you’re not saying it out loud because you’re polite, but—no. I didn’t tell him.”

  “Are you going to?” Imogen asks. “I mean, for the record I don’t actually think you’re obligated, after the way he totally fell off the face of the planet back in the fall. But that’s just me.”

  I huff a quiet laugh through my nose. “I don’t know,” I murmur, glancing over my shoulder at the closed bathroom door. “I wanted to back when it happened. You know I wanted to. But you’re right. He made it pretty clear he didn’t want anything to do with me after last summer. So I kind of don’t see what it would accomplish at this point except dredging a bunch of ugly stuff up again.”

  “I mean, I thought he made it pretty clear,” Imogen points out, “except for the part where apparently now he wants to embark on an international vacation with you and your new boyfriend like a giant weirdo.” She sighs. “God, I don’t even know where you all are going to sleep.”

  I smile at that, knowing this is about as much of a blessing as I’m likely to get. “Thank you, lady. I can’t wait to see you. You’re the best.”

  “I am, truly,” Imogen agrees, and I can hear the wry smile in her voice. “But Molly?”

  I close my eyes. “I know.”

  “I gotta say it anyway.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re playing with fire.”

  I hesitate. I want to explain to her that I’m not that person anymore, that I’ve spent the year making and remaking myself unt
il she’d hardly recognize the girl who blew through Star Lake like a category five hurricane last summer, knocking down houses and uprooting trees. What Gabe and I had was cozy and exhilarating and old-fashioned all at once somehow, a love like sitting next to a campfire wrapped in a blanket on a cool September night. But that’s over now.

  It has to be.

  I tilt my head back against the doorjamb, humming my quiet assent into the phone. “I know,” I promise again, a third time like a spell in a fairy tale. “But we’re friends, Imogen. Or we’re trying to be, maybe. That’s all.”

  “If you say so,” Imogen tells me, in a voice that lets me know she’s not convinced, not really, but she’s going to wait until she sees me in person to press me on it any more. “Either way, you better hurry up and get here before I change my mind.”

  I smile, climbing up off the tile and tucking my hair behind my ears. “I love you,” I tell her. “I’ll see you soon.”

  Ian and I pack our bags and use the app on my phone to find the train to the airport, my heart thrumming in a way I’d rather not examine too closely; by the time we get to the terminal I can’t keep myself from frantically scanning the crowd for familiar faces like a secret agent in a spy movie. There’s a part of me that’s hoping Gabe woke up full of the same existential dread that I did, that somehow he’ll have managed to talk Sadie out of this whole doomed endeavor.

  The other part of me can’t wait to see him again.

  In any event, the two of them are already sitting at the gate when we arrive, Sadie’s sandaled feet resting on her bulging backpack; she’s wearing denim shorts and an Outward Bound hoodie, her hair in a long French braid. “Hey,” Ian calls, raising an easy hand in greeting. “You came.”

  “We came!” Sadie agrees cheerily. Gabe, for his part, looks less than convinced. Still, he seems game enough, chatting with Ian about the crummy fielding the Red Sox have been doing lately and asking if we want anything when he and Sadie get up to get coffee.

  “Not so bad, right?” Ian asks me as they trot across the terminal, digging a Tana French mystery out of his bag and looking at me hopefully.

  “No,” I have to admit. “Not so bad.”

  I page through my own book while they’re gone, losing myself a bit in the story of a fancy party full of diplomats held hostage by South American terrorists. By the time Gabe and Sadie turn up again it’s nearly time to board. As Gabe’s passing by he drops something in my lap; I startle, blinking down in surprise at a package of Red Vines. For a second I think, dumbly, that he brought them from Star Lake—that’s how strongly I associate them with home—but when I look up at him in confusion he only shrugs.

  “Saw them at the newsstand,” he explains in a voice that pretty clearly communicates, I am begging you not to make a big deal about this. “Thought maybe you’d want ’em for the plane.”

  “Um.” I clear my throat. “Thanks,” I say, but he’s already sitting down on the other side of Sadie, peering at something she’s showing him on her phone. I might as well be vapor.

  Ian glances over curiously. “I didn’t know you liked those,” he says.

  “I used to, yeah.” It’s an understatement: I basically lived on Red Vines last summer, gnawing through them by the pallet load. I kept an emergency stash of them everywhere, my work locker and my nightstand and in the glove compartment of my car. I couldn’t find them in Boston, though, not to mention the fact that I wasn’t exactly hankering for culinary reminders of Star Lake after everything that happened. I haven’t even thought about them in months.

  But Gabe remembered.

  “Attention, passengers,” the gate attendant calls over the loudspeaker. I exhale, grateful for the distraction, and shove the Red Vines to the very bottom of my purse.

  Imogen is staying in a caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of a Sisters of the Resurrection convent on the west coast of Ireland, in County Kerry, where the hills are so green they’re almost blue. From the airport we take a bus to another bus, then drag ourselves and our backpacks two long miles up a steep, narrow lane flanked on either side by fields dotted with tiny white stucco houses. A light, chilly rain is falling, the smell of it brackish and new.

  “You guys regretting coming with us yet?” Ian calls over his shoulder, his grin wide and energized underneath his Sox cap. He loves an adventure more than anyone I’ve ever met—except maybe Sadie, whose body was apparently built for mountain climbing and high ropes courses and who looks like she could hike from here to Belfast without breaking a sweat.

  “Not yet!” she calls cheerfully, her braid swinging back and forth like a horse’s tail.

  For his part, Gabe is quiet, one thumb hooked in the strap of the duffel slung over his shoulder; he hasn’t had a ton to say since we got off the plane, and I can’t exactly blame him.

  “I do have to pee, though,” Sadie continues, slowing down a bit to wait for me, then peering over my shoulder. “We getting close?”

  “I think so?” I frown, puffing a bit from the long tromp up the hill. I’m following the map on my phone, but even with the international plan I sprung for my service is spotty here, fading in and out again. I’m starting to worry we’ve passed Imogen’s turn altogether when a church finally rises up in the distance, tall and stone-clad and spired. Next door is a sprawling Tudor that must be the convent, flanked by a bright, teeming garden; beyond that is the tiny cottage that belongs to Imogen and the other fellows. In her emails she described it as her hobbit hole, and I see now she wasn’t exaggerating: it looks half collapsed, crumbling mortar and mossy roof and a distinct list to one side, like it’s one heavy rainstorm away from being absorbed back into the earth.

  My heart stutters in pure anticipation: I haven’t seen Imogen since she came to visit me in Boston last fall after everything happened, the two of us cuddled in my extra-long twin bed watching movies on my laptop and eating convenience-store Pop Tarts. My pace quickens as I hurry up the leaf-slicked walkway, my roller bag bouncing awkwardly along behind me. I’m just reaching out to knock on the peeling red door—there’s no bell that I can see—when Imogen flings it open and squeals delightedly. “You made it!” she crows.

  “There are goats on your lawn,” I blurt out.

  Imogen laughs. “There sure are,” she agrees, apparently unfazed by their quiet bleating. “They belong to the ag kids, they’re all named after Beatles.” She steps back, smiling at the rest of my traveling party. “Come on in, guys.”

  Imogen has gained weight in a way that makes her look like a fifties pinup girl or a Botticelli angel, all milk-pale skin and jet-black bangs; she’s barefoot in a long floral sundress, a million silver bracelets up one arm. She introduces herself to Ian and Sadie with a grown-up confidence, then holds her arms out to Gabe. “Gabriel,” she says, mock formal. “Always a pleasure.”

  “Imogen,” Gabe echoes, grinning wry and rueful. “Likewise.”

  The inside of Imogen’s cottage reminds me of the set of some whimsical, madcap romantic comedy, only ugly. It has low ceilings and exposed wooden beams and a rust-colored kitchen that hasn’t seen any updates since the seventies at the latest; there’s a teeny sitting room with an ash-filled fireplace, a faded rag rug covering the sagging hardwood floor. “I’m going to put you guys on the pullout, but I can’t make any promises about how comfortable it is,” she tells Gabe and Sadie, nodding at a flowered love seat that looks as though perhaps it was rescued from a nursing home sometime before any of us were born. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “It’s great,” Sadie promises. “Thanks so much for having us, really.”

  Imogen laughs. “Let’s see if you’re still saying that once you’ve been here a couple of days,” she warns. “The convent isn’t exactly the kind of tourist attraction that draws people from miles around.”

  We shuffle down the dim, narrow hallway that leads to the pair of bedrooms at the back, Sadie peeling off into the tiny bathroom. “When you flush the toilet, there’s always this moment you th
ink you clogged it, but don’t worry,” Imogen instructs. “Just keep holding the handle down and eventually it’ll work.” She grimaces as the door shuts, lowers her voice. “I mean, like. Most of the time.”

  She leads us into a bedroom that smells strongly of cedar and is outfitted with a pressboard bureau, an antique student’s desk, and a gruesome painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “My roommate just went home to Alberta,” she explains, gesturing for Ian and me to drop our stuff on the narrow twin bed. “She was losing her shit about missing you, though, Mols—she’s like your mom’s biggest, creepiest fan. She brought all her books here in her suitcase to keep her from getting homesick.”

  “I didn’t know your mom was an author,” Sadie says, coming back out into the hallway. “That’s so cool.” Then, to Imogen: “You were right about the toilet, by the way.” Back to me: “Has she written anything I’d know?”

  “Um,” I begin, purposely not looking over at Gabe. “Well—”

  “Hey, did I tell you I bought wine and cheese like a damn adult?” Imogen interrupts loudly. “Come on, it’s in the kitchen. We’re going to have to drink the wine out of mugs with pictures of Saint Peter’s Basilica on them, but that’s okay.” As soon as Sadie’s back is turned she mouths sorry, and I shake my head; after all, it’s not like I’ve never had to explain my way out of that particular situation before. It’s an awkward occupational hazard of having your mom write a thinly disguised, hugely bestselling novel about your teenage love life.

  I’d been dating Patrick for a little over a year when things started to go sour between us; we’d been best friends since we were little, but navigating an actual relationship was messier and more complicated than either one of us was necessarily prepared for. I never meant for anything to happen with Gabe. When it did, just once in the spring of my sophomore year, I blurted the whole thing out to my mom in a fit of guilt and panic; my mom, blocked and past deadline and four years out from the last successful book she’d published, closed the door of her office and committed it to paper.