9 Days and 9 Nights

by Katie Cotugno

  It might not have needed to be such a disaster. After all, it’s an author’s job to make things up, to spin stories like spiderwebs right out of the air. But Diana Barlow’s literary comeback arrived with a slew of publicity, including a spread in People magazine in which she confessed to filching from reality—namely, her daughter’s relationship with two brothers from down the road.

  That was when all hell broke loose.

  Gabe was off at college in Indiana by then, so he ducked the worst of the blowback. Patrick dumped me so fast it all but bruised my tailbone, and their little sister, Julia, made it her mission to turn my life into a waking nightmare: enter boarding school in Arizona and the never-ending stream of Netflix documentaries. It wasn’t until last summer that I braved the trip back home to Star Lake—and, true to form, wound up making all the same mistakes one more time.

  But: that was then, I remind myself, following Ian down the hallway a full year later and clear on the other side of the world. I move through space more gently now. I’m careful about where I step.

  Imogen opens the bottle of wine with impressive ease and digs a fat block of cheese out of the pint-size refrigerator, plunking it on a chipped flowered plate and handing me a knife. “So, what I didn’t get is crackers,” she says sheepishly. “Sorry, dudes.”

  Ian shakes his head. “I’m off carbs anyway,” he says, and I grin. He’s tickled by this place, I can tell, like it’s straight out of one of the Roald Dahl books he devoured when he was in elementary school. I half expect there to be Twits living under the stairs.

  “So explain this fellowship to me?” Gabe asks as we settle ourselves in the living room, Sadie and him on the love seat and Ian folded into a rocking chair that looks like it’s constructed entirely of matchsticks. I lean against the sooty fireplace, ankles crossed in front of me. “I didn’t think rural Ireland was, like, a hotbed of feminist art.”

  “Well, that just shows how little you know about the art world, my friend,” Imogen says snootily, sitting down beside me and tucking her arm in mine. Then she laughs. “Nah. It was really just this one artist. She was a nun at the convent here who made all these Mary-centered paintings in the twelfth century. Really wild ones, too: Mary punching the devil in the face, Mary preaching in front of a big crowd of believers, Mary doing miracles. Women weren’t supposed to be doing any kind of art back then—especially not nuns, and especially not, like, this supposedly heretical stuff, so she signed them with a man’s name.”

  “What happened to her?” I ask.

  Imogen shrugs. “Eventually she got found out and they burned her as a witch.” She raises her wine mug, lips twisting ruefully. “Patriarchy!”

  I snort. “I love you.”

  “And I you,” Imogen says. “Anyway, the church sold the property to some hippie university in Vermont in the eighties to use as a study-abroad site—it’s mostly botany and agriculture majors on account of the garden and the animals and whatnot, but they also have three women artists come here every summer to, like, do the old art thing.” She shrugs. “It’s the randomest, I know.”

  “Random, but amazing,” I remind her, nudging her in the side with a gentle elbow. “Like a hundred other artists applied,” I tell Gabe.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Imogen says in a dopey voice. Then she smiles. “I really do love it here,” she confesses. “Actually—” she starts, then breaks off, seeming to change her mind about something. She knocks back the rest of her wine. “You guys wanna go see the village?” she asks. “We can pick up some stuff for dinner?”

  The five of us ramble down the winding road to the town’s one diminutive grocery, a narrow, dimly lit storefront packed full from the water-stained drop ceiling to the gritty linoleum floors. Domed cake stands stacked with homemade baked goods line a cheerful front table. An immaculate butcher counter gleams at the back.

  Imogen puts me in charge of a salad and I wander the perimeter of the shop for a while, picking out baby lettuce and fat summer tomatoes, a red onion and a hunk of blue cheese. I’m peering down the cramped aisles looking for dressing when I catch sight of Gabe and Sadie leaning up against a shelf full of digestive biscuits, their tall, narrow bodies angled close together. Sadie giggles, reaching up to flick his earlobe playfully. Gabe rubs a casual hand across her side.

  I take a step back, irrationally startled; I scurry away and pretend to be really interested in the label of some Irish butter, my jealous heart thumping useless adrenaline all through my limbs. I’m being stupid—they’re a couple, Molly, I remind myself; of course they touch—but I’m also freshly stung. I thought it was real, what Gabe and I had last summer. But seeing him with Sadie makes it achingly clear why he didn’t call me back in the fall.

  I found out I was pregnant my second full week of classes in Boston, squatting over the toilet in the handicapped bathroom in my dorm, the taste of my own heart hot and metallic at the back of my mouth. I buried the test at the bottom of the garbage can and zipped my jeans up with shaking hands, pushing my hair out of my suddenly sweaty face as I stumbled out into the brightly lit hallway. I remember there were two guys tossing a Nerf football back and forth, an RA yelling at them to cut it out before they hit the sprinklers, and I remember thinking it didn’t matter. I remember thinking that nothing did.

  I stood there for a moment watching dumbly, a sound like a hundred-story skyscraper collapsing deep inside my head. Then I did what I always did, faced with a reality too big and terrifying to get my arms around:

  I ran.

  I wasn’t wearing my gym clothes. I had ankle boots on my feet. But I took off at a dead tear anyway, down the stairs and out the door and through the crowd of strangers on the sidewalk, ignoring the dirty looks and quizzical cries in my wake. My hair streamed like a flag behind me. My lungs burned in the still-humid air. I ran as hard and as fast as I could manage with no destination in mind besides the obvious: Not here. Not now.

  “Hey,” Imogen says now, laying a cool, firm hand on my arm and squeezing. When I startle alert I see she’s followed my sight line, is looking at me with worried eyes. “You ready?”

  “Yup,” I promise, swallowing, plucking a tomato out of my basket and waggling it in her direction as evidence. “Let’s go.”

  Back at the house we put the boys in charge of dinner prep while the rest of us open another bottle of wine, Imogen turning Beyoncé up on her little Bluetooth speaker. “What do you want, fiddles?” she asks, when Ian raises his eyebrows in her direction. “Beyoncé is appropriate on all continents.”

  “Fair enough,” Ian says, holding his hands up and grinning. “I know when I’m outnumbered.”

  Imogen and I take our wineglasses out to the tiny covered porch off the side of the cottage, which houses a rickety wicker love seat and a few scraggly plants in chipped terra-cotta pots. “It’s my plant hospital,” Imogen explains. “I take the ones the ag kids think are too far gone to save.”

  I smile. “Of course you do.” Imogen loves broken things, projects and fixer-uppers. It’s probably why she’s stayed friends with me all these years.

  “So what is going on with you, Boston girl?” she asks me, propping her feet up on the wobbly coffee table and lifting her chin in my direction. “You’re looking very Bostonian these days, actually.”

  I glance down at my jeans and simple black tank top, the long gray cardigan I brought to wear over everything. “What does that mean?” I ask.

  Imogen shrugs. “It’s not an insult,” she says. “It’s just not how you normally dress, that’s all.”

  She’s not wrong, I guess. Back in high school I was always drawn to brighter colors: flowy purple tank tops or neon-yellow jeans, a pair of bright-red cork-heeled sandals I found while trailing her through a questionable secondhand shop outside of Star Lake. Sometime last fall, though, my entire wardrobe started to feel slightly ridiculous. I don’t know how much of that is just a function of growing up and how much of it is more pointed—a line of sartorial demarcation between th
e old me and the new one. I guess I hadn’t really thought about it. “It’s faster to get ready,” I tell her, trying to sound casual. “If all my clothes match all my other clothes.”

  “It’s very Steve Jobs,” Imogen teases. “Very business school.” Then, off my wide-eyed expression: “What? It’s a compliment!”

  I snort. “I’m sorry, how is ‘you look like Steve Jobs’ a compliment, exactly?”

  “Oh, shut up.” Imogen shakes her head. “You look good. And, speaking of compliments, can I just say that I’m really glad you decided to come on this trip?”

  “Oh yeah?” I ask teasingly. “You missed me that badly, huh?”

  “I mean, obviously.” She shrugs. “But even beyond that, I don’t know. I just feel like maybe it’s good, a chance for you to get out of your normal routine or whatever. It seemed like maybe there wasn’t a whole lot of room in your life for, like, whimsy, after everything that happened last year.”

  I bristle at that a little bit, I can’t help it, even though I know she’s only trying to look out for me. “I mean, I don’t think it’s that there’s not room for whimsy,” I tell her. “I just kind of like things more planned and organized now, that’s all.” Then I grin. “You know, like Steve Jobs.”

  It’s good to catch up in person after months of texts and Gchats, both of us talking as fast as we can: about the on-campus apartment I’m going to live in this fall with my roommate, Roisin, and a bunch of other girls we know; about her mom’s yearly cancer scan, which—thankfully—came back clean; about Sabrina Hudson, who just posted an expletive-laden Instagram update excoriating the paparazzi camped outside her DJ boyfriend’s house.

  “That girl should read a book,” Imogen says with a sigh, and I shrug noncommittally. I don’t know why I feel weirdly defensive of Sabrina—after all, she’s a millionaire celebrity with every advantage in the world and, in all likelihood, nobody to blame for this ugly circus but herself. Still, I guess I know what it’s like to have outsiders speculating smugly about how you’ll next manage to embarrass yourself with your own bad behavior. I know what it’s like to have people rooting for you to fail.

  “What’s your boy situation, PS?” I ask, sitting back and pulling one leg up onto the tottery love seat, wrapping my arms around my knee to ward off the damp Irish chill. Imogen broke up with Jay, her boyfriend from Star Lake, halfway through this year; back in the spring she declared a dating sabbatical, but I’m not sure if it stuck or not. “Is that what you were being cagey about before, when you were saying how much you like it here? I thought I got a distinct whiff of, like, Saint Paddy’s–type sexytimes.”

  “Oh my God, stop!” Imogen exclaims, then claps a hand over her freckly alabaster face. “We’ve been dating all summer,” she admits, peeking at me from between two fingers. “His name is Seamus.”

  “Oh my God, naturally.” I laugh. “What’s he like?”

  He’s a mechanic, Imogen tells me; he lives with his family on the other side of the village, in a house with three elegant setters. “He feels older than us, does that make sense?” she asks, face alight with a rosy flush. “I mean, he is a little older than us, he’s twenty-two, but it’s also more than that. I don’t know.” She shrugs. “He’s serious. He makes me want to be serious, too.”

  “Well, don’t get too serious,” I tease. “I like you the way you are.”

  “Uh-huh.” Imogen makes a face. “Anyway, you’re definitely going to meet him while you’re here, and I have a bunch more stuff to tell you about him, but first you go,” she says. “Please tell me all the things about Handsome Ian, but also more importantly please tell me what British drugs you were smoking that made you think it was a good idea to invite—”

  She breaks off as the back door creaks open and Sadie pokes her head out, then startles a bit—probably at our abrupt, wide-eyed silence. “I’m sorry,” she says, holding a half-empty wine bottle up like an offering. “I don’t want to interrupt anything. I was just looking for some fresh air.”

  “You’re not interrupting anything,” I promise, scooting over to make room for her on the love seat and somehow managing not to fling myself to the floor and writhe in agony at the idea of Ian and Gabe now alone in the kitchen together, cooking dinner. “Come sit.”

  “You sure?” Sadie hesitates another moment, and immediately I feel like a bitch for not having invited her out here in the first place. Imogen must, too, because she motions Sadie closer.

  “Yes! Come!” she says. “And bring that wine.”

  I keep expecting it to be awkward around Sadie, but Imogen is the most gracious of hostesses, and the truth is the conversation feels easy: we cover Sadie’s terrifying org chem professor and Imogen’s fellowship portfolio and the internship I had over the summer, as a glorified errand girl at a social media startup in a high-rise at the Seaport in Boston. I got coffee and made copies, but they also let me sit in on strategy meetings and help proof presentations to investors.

  “It was really cool,” I confess, thinking of the buzzing, frenetic energy in the clean white offices, the tall windows looking out over the harbor. “They offered to keep me on for the fall so that maybe I could get a few credits, but I need to see if I can make it work once classes start again.”

  Sadie nods. “You’re a business major, right?”

  “She is,” Imogen answers for me. “After graduation she’s going to make a trillion dollars founding all-female tech startups and selling them to Google.”

  I snort. “Oh, is that what I’m going to do?”

  Imogen shrugs. “Just a suggestion. I’m calling it into the universe. Power of manifesting, et cetera.”

  Sadie smiles a little uncertainly, but that’s just Imogen: all crystals and smudge sticks, an altar to the Goddess set up at her mom’s house back in Star Lake. “Do you like it?” Sadie asks me. “The major, I mean.”

  “I do,” I tell her truthfully. I like the math and the logic and the strategy, the orderliness of it all. “I mean, my classes are all kind of bro central, but other than that.”

  “Ugh, you’re probably sitting there surrounded by every boat shoe in Boston,” Imogen says ruefully. “Is there any kind of women’s organization?”

  I raise my eyebrows. “What, like a support group?”

  “I mean, I guess you could call it that, if you’re trying to make it sound silly,” Imogen says, rolling her eyes. “But more just like a place for you all to talk stuff out and come up with strategies so you’re not getting steamrolled all the time. Some girls at Harvard did it; I read about it in Rookie.”

  “Is it like that in premed?” I ask Sadie, wanting to include her in the conversation. “It’s gotta be, right? Total sausage fest?”

  Sadie frowns. “Sort of, maybe,” she says, considering. “But I guess I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about that stuff, you know? I feel like people make too big a deal about it sometimes. Like, as long as you’re doing good work, I don’t see why it matters if you’re a girl or a guy.”

  Imogen tilts her head to the side, an expression on her face that I recognize immediately as the one she wears right before she’s about to take someone to school about feminism. “Well, the thing is,” she begins calmly, but Gabe opens the back door just then, a dish towel slung over one shoulder. His gaze darts back and forth between Sadie and me, and I wonder briefly if he wants to writhe on the floor in agony, too. “What are you guys talking about?” he asks.

  “Starting an all-girl metal band,” I answer immediately.

  Gabe nods. “Sounds awesome,” he says without missing a step. “You’re great on the tambourine. You guys wanna eat?”

  Inside, the boys have put together a pretty decent pasta dinner, pesto made with basil from the convent’s overflowing garden and hunks of chewy bread from the bakery counter at the shop. Imogen lights a couple of fat vanilla candles and plunks them on the table, and the whole effect is kind of intimate and cozy, the smell of garlic and the sound of the rain pattering quietl
y against the rooftop, spaghetti heaped into piles on mismatched plates. As I pass Sadie a mixing bowl full of salad greens studded with tiny red radishes it occurs to me that maybe this wasn’t actually such a catastrophic idea after all. Maybe it really is ancient history, what happened between me and Gabe on the other side of the ocean. Maybe we really have moved on.

  After dinner we drift off in different directions, Sadie slipping outside to call her mom back in Omaha and Ian wandering over to examine the bookshelves, which are full of yellowing C. S. Lewis paperbacks and what look like catechism books from the seventies. I stack a bunch of plates and bring them into the kitchen only to find Gabe already in there, sleeves of his thermal pushed up to the elbows and the stainless-steel sink full of soapy water. “You don’t have to wash those,” I tell him, nodding at the pile of dirty pots waiting on the drainboard. “You guys cooked.”

  “It’s fine,” Gabe says, shaking his head. “I like having a job.”

  “Well,” I say, hesitating for a moment, a precarious load of dishes listing dangerously in my arms. I set them down on the counter, careful to leave a wide berth between us. It’s the first time we’ve been alone since last night at the bar in London. Already that seems like a lifetime ago. “I can dry, at least.”

  Gabe doesn’t say anything either way, but he shifts to make room for me, and for a few minutes we work in a silence that isn’t exactly companionable. He was quiet through dinner, too, I realize, and the more I think about it the stupider I feel. Just because I felt like this was going okay—was enjoying myself, even—doesn’t mean anything has changed between us. He’s probably counting the minutes until he can grab his new girlfriend and escape back to his peacefully Barlow-free life.

  “Look,” I begin, twisting the thin dish towel between my nervous hands. “I’m sorry about all this. I know you kind of got dragged here against your will.”

  Gabe huffs a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “Don’t worry about it,” he tells me. “I made my own bed. The whole thing just kind of got away from me, you know? I was so surprised to see you last night at the bar that I didn’t know how to explain—”