Annette:By this, I'm guessing you mean not letting you get back on your bullshit.
Brooke:No. I mean, why do you care so much?
Annette:Because there's nothing you can do that will ever push me away, so stop trying.
* * *
Same stolen robe,same wet hair, same bare feet, same ocean view. But it was a different day and I had a new set of regrets to keep me company while the autumn sun heated my skin and dried my hair. A different kind of hollowed-out loneliness to keep me company.
It was unusually warm for late September. As the story went, I was born on a day much like this one. A bright, clear sky overflowing with sunshine while only the slightest hint of cool, crisp air lingered in the breeze. The trees were a riot of red, orange, and gold, and the barren grayness of winter seemed impossibly distant. The kind of day captured in postcards and photography books and B-roll footage.
It was the perfect miracle of a day for a perfect miracle of a baby to be born.
And Iwasperfect. Not in any of the ways that meant something, but in all the ways that'd made my parents happy. I was beautiful. My hair was platinum blonde and my eyes sapphire. My skin barely tanned, never freckled. I was tall and lean, but never so much that anyone took note of either. Add to that some high cheekbones, full lips, and luck of the draw facial symmetry and I was one beautiful baby who grew into a beautiful child and then a beautiful young adult whose awkward phase lasted all of a week. It was the easy, shallow kind of beauty that signified nothing.
I was a miracle too. As that story went, I was so much of a miracle, my parents named me twice. They'd known on that sunny day in September that I'd be their only child—the only one they'd carry out the hospital doors—and that was all the reason they needed to saddle me with two first names. They'd hoped their little miracle would fill all the voids they'd identified in their lives, mend their differences, and save their marriage. But babies never saved marriages. They didn't make up for falling out of love after two decades of bitterness and disappointment and they didn't fix the things that'd broken along the way.
I wasn't the perfect miracle they'd needed, but dammit, I'd tried to be. I tried to be everything, anything. Whatever it was, I did it until I couldn't do it anymore. Until rendering my entire existence down into the glue necessary to keeping a broken family together succeeded only in burning off every last bit of my miraculous shine. But it was a challenge I'd been born to best and even now—more than sixteen years after walking away from Talbott's Cove and dysfunction and miracles that weren't—I was still trying. Still failing. And still angry as hell that I had to hold it all together for everyone else.
The sour irony of this challenge was that no one outside my father's house expected anything from me. Most people looked at me and expected nothing more than my face. Once they tossed in the cutesy hyphenated name and the family known for settling in provincial Maine a full century before the Mayflower departed from Plymouth, the expectations ceased to exist. I didn't need to be generous or smart or capable. Pretty and privileged were impressive enough for the world, but underneath all this blonde hair and behind these blue eyes was a mind overqualified for my appearance. I wasn't supposed to say that, but it was the straight truth.
I wasn't the person anyone expected. I wasn't the version they wanted. More often than not, I wasn't the version I wanted either.
I dragged a hand through my hair, pushing it over my ear as I watched the water. I did this every day. Not the wet hair, bare feet, stolen kimono, whole life navel-gazing thing, but trying to find the farthest visible point from Talbott's Cove and imagining myself there. On cloudless days like today, I could wish myself all the way to Matinicus Island. It was nothing more than a slab of rock in the middle of Penobscot Bay, but goddamn, it wasn't here.
If I was there, I wouldn't have to be me.
Chapter Nine
JJ
Absolute Return: an asset’s achieved earnings over a period of time.
October
The kid was pissedand I couldn't say I blamed him.
"You want me to live in a bar? And work here too?" Nate asked the sheriff. He shifted the cardboard box he held to his hip and glanced around the tavern's empty dining room. "This was thegoodidea?"
"I recognize it's unconventional," Jackson replied, holding out alisten to reason, sonhand. "However, I've heard time and again you don't see alcohol as a coping mechanism and Mr. Harniczek here—"
"Christ almighty, don't call me that."
Under no circumstances did I want to have a conversation with Sheriff Lau before ten in the morning. Not a single one and yet here I was, shoulder to shoulder with that shined-shoes, do-good motherfucker at nine fifteen.
I held out my hand to Nate, as he preferred to be addressed. "JJ, please."
"All right,JJ," Nate replied with a huff. "No disrespect, man, but I don't see how this is going to work. I'm pretty sure my father carved his name into that barstool right over there. Alcohol doesn't do shit for me, but after enough time around my father, I'd start gnawing on the wood just to get high off the varnish." He angled his body to face Jackson. "I know you're sticking your neck out there and pulling favors for me, but I can't stay in this town."
Jackson went for thelisten to reasonhand again. I rolled my eyes. "Let's not jump to any conclusions. You can—"
"Yeah, I can go to Portland or Orono or Machias, or literally anywhere but this town where no one leaves, no one changes, and no one forgets a fucking thing," Nate interrupted. He dropped the box, shrugged off his backpack. He brought his fingers to his temples, rubbing as he stared at the floor. "I appreciate you trying to set this up, but it's not gonna work. I'll find somewhere else to crash."
"Or you can decide it doesn't matter." I shoved my hands into my front pockets. "This place, these people. Your parents. You can decide whether any of it matters to you." Jackson and Nate turned toward me at the same time. "Will there be shitty moments when those things force their way into your life? Of course. My father dropped dead of a heart attack my last year of high school. If you ask anyone around here, they'll say I blew off college because of it. That wasn't the reason, but I have better things to do than chase down everyone's thoughts and waste my time trying to fix them." I bent down and picked up his box. It was much heavier than I'd expected. "Nothing good will come from running up to Orono or Macias."
He turned away from us, exhaling heavily as he went. "And staying here is that much better?"
Behind Nate's back, the sheriff and I exchanged glances. I shook my head, gestured to my watch. Jackson held up his palm and gave me a chastising stare. I tapped my watch again and hooked a thumb over my shoulder. He responded by shifting his gaze to Nate.
