He’d told me that they’d talked it through a lot, that the campground had meant so much to them, almost their whole lives. That while they hoped I’d find a place for the Wilderness/Wellness camp, they weren’t sure if I was ready for something like this. “I bought that land when I was twenty-three years old,” Paul had said, the pride in his voice unmistakable. “I bought it for her, to give her something she would love, and we’ve loved this place like it’s something that came from us, together. It’s important to us that the next owners have a similarethic in mind.”
I’d heard that like a bomb blast—so loud that it’d deafened me to everything the rest of the day except for my own thoughts. Wasn’t it love that had inspired me to go after the camp? My love for my lost brother, my best friend, the other half of me that I couldn’t save? I’d worked it over in my mind, again and again, but I’d kept coming back tothe same thing.
I hadn’t done it for love.
I’d done it for guilt. For grief and pain and the determination that I could fix something after so many years of not being able to fix the very worst thing in my life. I’d brought Zoe in on it, and it didn’t matter what I felt for her now. What mattered was what I’d felt for her then, how I’d brought her there under false pretenses. How I’d used her.Convenient,I remember telling Charlie and Ahmed.Willing. Available.After all that had changed between us, after everything she’d invested all on her own in helping me, I’d basically called her a means to an end in front of people she’d come to like and respect. It makes me sick to think of it. It had, actually, made me physically sick, that afternoon at the lodge. Once I’d realized she’d gone, I’d run out onto the porch, had seen Sheree’s car driving away, and dry-heaved in panic over the railing.
“You don’t want anything?” my mom says from across the table, where she’s been sitting for the last twenty minutes, silently working at the word jumble in the paper and occasionally looking up at me in concern. I pretend not to notice, to be interested in the front page, but I haven’t turned the page for as long as we’ve sat here, same as I haven’t touched the bowl of oatmeal she set at my elbow.
“Not hungry.”
“You’ve got a long shift ahead. You should eat.”
I wonder if Zoe’s been eating,I think, picturing her in the seat I’m in now, tidily eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while I glowered at her, every feeling I had toward her then the wrong one. I stand up, the bowl in one hand. “I’ll get something on the way in,” I lie. “You think Pop’ll want this?”
“Maybe,” she says. Pop’s outside, raking leaves, still ten times quieter than he used to be but even I can see that something’s different about him. Maybe it’s the house, getting back into the routines of his old life. “Aiden, sit down here withme for a bit.”
“I’ve gotto get going.”
And I really, really do. Right now work’s the only thing holding me together, the only place I feel useful. But even work’s not easy—Ahmed and Charlie know that things have gone wrong, and the only thing I can say about that is that neither of them have bothered to say that they told me so. Instead they pick up a lot of my slack, doing all the extra, anal-retentive chores I usually take care of—inventory and fridge clean-out and equipment testing. And they tread lightly, particularly after Tuesday’s shift, when Ahmed told me that the night before, he’d run into Kit and Greer coming out of Betty’s. No sign of Zoe, he’d said, though they’d had takeout bags with them. I’d felt my chest compress under the weight of all the questions I had no fucking right to ask.
But then we’d got a call, Mrs. Gilchrist again in another new nightgown, and I’d been spared from even trying.
“Just for a bit,” she says. “You look tired.”
Seems like there’s been no point in sleeping, either, really. Every time I close my eyes, I see her. Even when I’m foggy headed and bone tired, I see her, that gray-faced shame I’d seen in her when my mother had said,You’re with this person?I’d said nothing—nothing at all—to defend her.
I slide back down into my chair, too tired to bother arguing. I’m in this house like a ghost, not even in my own body. It’s not even the phantom-self feeling I used to get, right after Aaron was gone. It’s worse, if that’s possible, as if I’ve compounded the loss.
It feels as if there’s no self there at all, no part of me that I can rally to care aboutwhat’s coming.
My mom takes a deep breath, pushes her word jumble away. “I know you’re disappointed about the camp.”
I keep my eyes down on the table, my hands clasped loosely across my stomach, waiting for this to be over. There is not one thing worth explaining to my mother about my disappointment, about how little of it has to do with that fucking camp.
“But you’ll find another location, Aiden. I know you will. You made a mistake, getting that woman involved, and I’m sure that was a big part of theproblem, and—”
“Mom,” I say, for the first time realizing that I do, in fact, remember how it feels to care. I run my hand up the back of my neck, over my hair, inhale through my nose before I speak again. “I did make a mistake. But Zoe is not even one single shred of a part of that mistake. What she did, how you know her—that is not her.” I pause, take a big breath through my nose before blowing it out on a frustrated sigh. “Or—you know what? It is her. It’s part of her, same as the part of her that wanted to fix it, and if I hadn’t fucked everything up she’d have had a chance to say her apologies to you and Pop and get on with her life. It’s me that was the problem.”
“Well, I doubt that,” she says, defensively.
“Don’t,” I snap. “Don’t doubt it. Don’t make me into the perfect son here, Mom. I have never deserved it less than I do right this second.”
“Honey, all of us, even Paul and Lorraine, we understand what you were trying to do foryour brother.”
I push back from the table, taking up the bowl again and dumping it into the sink, relishing the clank it makes. “I wasn’t doing it for him,” I say, turning and leaning back against the counter so I can see the surprise register on her face. “I was doing it for myself, to feel better about what a shit job I did when he was alive. To make it okay that I couldn’t save him.”
Mom is silent, her mouth slightly open, her eyes darting to the back door, where my dad still rakes. She doesn’t want him to hear this, but oddly enough, I get the feeling hecould take it.
“The only good that came of it was her,” I say, quietly. “I’m sure you don’t believe it. But with her—I felt like myself again, for a while.”
“Aiden,” she says, her voice disbelieving. “Do you…lovethis woman?”
Involuntarily, I laugh—it’s a dark, ugly thing, short and scornful. “Yeah, Mom,” I say, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, because, at least to me, itis—now it is, at the worst possible time, now that I’ve lost her. I press the heels of my hands to my eyes before I let them drop back, curling them around the edge of the counter behind me. “It hurts how I love her.” I can feel how I’ve steeled my middle to say it. That’s where it hurts, right in the center of me.
“Hurts all the time?” sheasks, quietly.
I think about being with Zoe, at the campsite. The way I’d loved to watch her, right from the beginning—the way I’d loved it, even when I thought I was hating it. The way she made me laugh—out-loud prayers and peanut-sized ticks and Cocktoberfest and marshmallow stuck in her hair, every time she called me on my shit or served me up a steaming hot plate ofyou’re-being-an-asshole, every time she called me Boy Scout. “No,” I say. “Hurts since she’s gone.”
