His eyes slit open. “Did I come to San Francisco, or did you come to Montana?”
I snort.
His eyes flash.
“I haven’t had time to do laundry in the last month,” I say. “I definitely didn’t fly to Montana and walk around a ranch in a ten-gallon hat.”
Somberly, he asks, “How many pairs of underwear do you own?”
“Now, that I’m sure no one will ask you,” I say.
“You haven’t done laundry in a month,” he replies. “I’m just doing that math, Harriet.”
“Well, if I run out, at least Parth’s packing list for you has me covered.”
“And if you visited me,” he says, “no part of your visit would have been me marching you around a ranch in a ten-gallon hat. What exactly do you think I do all day?”
“Furniture repair,” I say with a shrug. “Rodeo clowning. Maybe that one senior water aerobics class Gloria was always trying to get us to go to when we used to visit.”
Date beautiful women, breathe in the Montana air, and feel whole-body relief to have left San Francisco, and me, behind.
“How is Gloria?” I ask.
Wyn’s head falls back against the door. “Good.” He doesn’t go on.
It stings like he meant for it to, this reminder that I’m not entitled to any more information about his mother, his whole family, than this one-word reply.
Then his face softens, mouth quirking. “I did try the water aerobics class with her.”
“Yeah, right.”
He sets a hand across his heart. “I swear.”
My snort of laughter catches me off guard. Even stranger, it doesn’t stop after one, instead devolving until it’s like popcorn is exploding through my chest, until I feel—almost—like I’m crying instead of laughing.
All the while Wyn stands there, leaned against the door, watching me, bemused. “Are you quite finished, Harriet?”
“For now.”
He nods. “So I visited you in San Francisco. Last month.”
Any trace of humor evaporates from the air. “That’s the story.”
He studies me for a beat too long. My face prickles. My blood hums.
We both jump at a sudden, high-pitched blast of sound from down the hall.
Wyn sighs. “Parth got an air horn app.”
“God save us,” I say.
“He used it like fifteen times before you got here. As you can imagine, it hasn’t gotten old.”
I bite my lip before any hint of a smile can surface. I refuse to let myself be charmed by him. Not again.
“Well.” He pushes away from the door. “I’ll leave you to . . .”
He waves toward me, as if to wordlessly communicate Standing alone in this dark bathroom.
“That would be great,” I say, and then he’s gone.
I count to twenty, then let myself out, heart still pounding. After pausing in the kitchen long enough to fill my abandoned wineglass to the very brim, I step back out into the brisk chill of night. Everyone’s bundled up now, a fire burning in the stone pit, my friends crowded around and wrapped in a mishmash of towels, sweatshirts, and blankets. I take a seat beside Cleo and she pulls me into a side hug, rearranging her flannel blanket over my bare legs too. “Everything good?” she asks.
“Of course it is,” I insist, snuggling closer. “I’m in my happy place.”
7
HAPPY PLACE
KNOTT’S HARBOR, MAINE
THE KIDS’ ROOM. Warped floorboards and crooked windows, creamy drapes, and twin beds topped in matching blue-gray quilts on either wall. My first week back with my friends after my London semester, and I’m sharing a room with a virtual stranger.
A pleasantly musty smell, tempered by lemon verbena furniture polish.
By cinnamon toothpaste. By pine, clove, woodsmoke, and strange pale eyes that wink and flash like some nocturnal animal. Not that I’m looking at him.
I can’t keep looking at him. But within hours of meeting Wyn Connor, it’s obvious he has his own gravity. I can’t bring myself to look at him straight on in the full light of day, always start loading dishes or drawing a net through the pool when he’s too close.
From the early mornings curtained in mist to late at night, my subconscious tracks him.
I’m living two separate weeks. One of them is bliss, the other torture. Sometimes they’re indistinguishable.
I laze in the pool with Cleo while she reads some artist’s memoir or encyclopedia exclusively about mushrooms. I wander the antique shops, junk shops, fudge shops in town with Sabrina. Parth and I walk up to the coffee place and the little red lobster roll stand with the constant hour-long line.
We play chicken in the pool, Never Have I Ever around the firepit. We pass around bottles of sauvignon blanc, rosé, chardonnay.
“Will your dad mind that we’re drinking his wine?” Wyn asks.
I wonder if he’s worried, like I was the first time Sabrina brought Cleo and me here, if he’s realizing she’d have every right to present us with bills at the end of the week, bills that the rest of us couldn’t afford.
“Of course he’d mind,” Sabrina replies, “if he ever noticed. But he’s incapable of noticing anything that’s not inside a Swiss bank account.”
“He has no idea what he’s missing,” Cleo says.
“All of my favorite things happen outside of Swiss bank accounts,” Parth agrees.
“All my favorite things are here,” I say.
In the hottest part of the day, we take turns leaping off the end of the pier below the bluff, making a game out of not reacting to the icy shock of the Atlantic, then lie on the sun-warmed platform watching the clouds stampede past.
Sabrina plans our drinks and meals to perfection. Parth finds ways to turn everything into an elaborate game or competition, as in the case of the pier-jumping game we name DON’T FUCKING SCREAM. And Cleo, almost out of nowhere, asks questions like, “Are there any places you go back to again and again in your dreams?” or “Would you redo high school if you could?” Parth says he would, because he had a great high school experience; Cleo says she would, because she had a horrible time and would like the chance to correct it; and the rest of us agree it would take a many-dollared offer to tempt us to relive our own mediocre experiences.
After that, Cleo asks, “If you could have another life entirely, separate from this one, what would you do?”
Parth says, right away, he’d join a band. Sabrina takes a minute to decide she’d be a chef.
“Back when my parents were still together,” she says, “when we’d come out here for the summer, Mom and I would cook these elaborate meals. It was a whole-day thing. Like we had nowhere to be, nothing to do but be together.”
While she’s always shared blunt observations and flippantly self-aware comments about her family life and her past—like Sorry if that came out too strong. It’s my child-of-a-narcissist complex. I still think I have thirty seconds to make my case before everyone gets bored—it’s rarer for her to share happy memories.
It’s a gift, this bit of tenderness she’s brought out to show us. It’s an honor to be trusted with something so sacred and rare as Sabrina’s softness.