“Thanks,” she said quietly, sinking back into her seat, not looking at me. “For coming around and… talking. It’s good to see you again.”
I paused at her door, my hand on the handle, looking back at her, before I softened into a smile. “You’re a good friend, Linda. We’ll get in another hike together before I go.”
“That’d be nice. Yeah.”
It would be. The thought kept me moving, out the door, through my day in a whirlwind, not even stopping for breath. It was Nayla first, to talk about some old business and clear the air, and then Kaitlyn, and then I got to hit up Charlie and talk it through directly. Came out of it feeling winded—not the easiest conversation in my life, but I couldn’t stop now if I wanted to—and I went through the rest of everyone I knew like I was doing a press tour, visiting some people, calling some.
One constant across all of them: they didn’t want me to leave. Said they’d miss me. Asked me when I’d visit. I gave them all the same noncommittal answer, that I’d see—that Texas was a long way away—but when I trudged exhausted back in through my front door in the evening, I already knew the answer. Dropped down at my candle-making station, and I moved everything for the order out of the way, opening the box of scent samples for Alyssa’s candle.
It wasn’t going to be quite the right scent. Wouldn’t be quite the right shade of blue for her eyes. But it was better to try. I’d thrown the flowers out the back window, those blue ones Alyssa loved, but I could go for a walk. Pick a couple of them back up.
It was late when I made the last call for the evening, to the person I wanted the least to talk to: Chad from San Antonio. He sounded enthusiastic when he picked up, and I hated to disappoint the guy.
“Hey, Jade,” he said. “Thanks for getting back to me. Figured out your availability?”
“I did.” I sat back in my chair, looking at the candle mold in front of me, still smelling sweet with that delicate blend of orchid and vanilla that made up the base of her scent. “Sorry to say, but my situation’s… changed. I won’t be able to move for the foreseeable future.”
Chad was a bit annoyed. But I could live with an annoyed Chad if it meant I didn’t have to go to fucking Texas.
When a knock came from my front door, I was in a better mood than I had been the last time—walked like I was floating between reality and not, into the entryway and opening the door. Once again, I wasn’t really surprised to see Daniela and Cat there, but this time, I wasn’t planning on fighting them. My hand was still a little tender from last time, anyway.
“Hey,” Daniela said. “Look, I know you’re probably pissed off and don’t—”
“I’m going to stay.”
She blinked, staring at me for a second, before she dropped her hands by her sides. “Damn, woman, I didn’t even ask yet.”
“And I want to see Alyssa again. Here, I mean. I just need to talk to her. I can explain it’s not like she thinks. I don’t want to goanywhere. Especially not to waste my life away in Texas knowing Alyssa is out there somewhere and wondering what could have happened with her if I’d done things differently.” I stood up taller, my heart racing so fast I felt lightheaded. “I want to try. I know she’s your friend I met through you, so maybe it’s a little weird, but… you won’t be mad if I want to date her, will you?”
She laughed. “I heard you’d been weird today. I’m glad Cat managed to talk you back from the ledge.”
I scowled. “Oh, Cat told you all about her adventures breaking into my house, huh?”
Cat grinned, waving to me from the bottom of the stoop. I hadn’t even been signing. I guess she was just that invested in her trespassing.
“I was, uh… coming around to ask you the same thing,” Daniela said. “I know it makes me look like a creep, but I went back through our old conversations and found her address from when she lived at her mom’s, and I’m planning to go see herand take her back here by force if I have to, so… do you want to come?”
I guess the three of us really were all on the same page. Always had been. We just got a bit interrupted for a little while. And now we were four on the same page.
“Yeah,” I said. “We can all take a page from Cat’s book and go creep on somebody else’s house. Just, uh… I’ve just got a candle that needs to set a bit more first.”
Chapter 31
Alyssa
Imade a mistake. What was it about the human experience that meant you always realized that once it was too late to fix it?
There was a reason I’d left this town in the first place. Bad memories felt acrid in my throat and heavy in my mind as soon as I crossed over onto familiar streets, the same sandwich shop at the intersection next to the bank branch that had been there since I was a baby, that I’d memorized as where to turn to get to my first boyfriend’s house back in high school when I was learning to drive. The field with the windmills in the distance that we’d go by on the drive to school. Every one of them clenched harder in my chest until I felt like I’d throw up, clutching the steering wheel hard.
Mom’s house had been just a fuzzy memory in my mind, like I could pinpoint the details if I thought about it hard enough but mostly just existed as a dark cloud somewhere in the back of my memories, but as soon as I saw the front of the building, I was right back in it again, sixteen years old and depressed in the bedroom on the second floor, left side, the same dogwood tree in from of the window, not having changed a bit.
I parked the car in front of the house and shut off the music, clutching the steering wheel hard in both hands. Faded browns were all around, grass the pale yellow-green of a sunbaked field. Everything felt so lifeless, so colorless, it felt like I was seeing in sepia tones, like Dorothy hadn’t yet made it to Oz.
I’d never understood when I was little why Dorothy wanted to go home so badly. The ending broke my heart the first time I saw it. I asked my mom, and she saidDorothy wants to go home because that’s where everyone she loves is,but didn’t she love all the friends she met? Were you not allowed to find and meet and love new people? Were we all born in a chain fixed to the earth, and wherever you went, it would pull on you?
Whenever I saw the movie by myself, I’d turn it off right before she got back to Kansas. This time, though, I couldn’t turn the movie off. Dorothy’s house was staring back at me, and Miss Gulch was at the gates.
Mom met me at the front door, and it was surreal talking to her, the woman who had been gigantic in my memories—this figure who towered over me and could make the world turn or stop at will—I’d forgotten she was shorter than me. Just a little bit. She was just a middle-aged woman with an unstylish bob cut and a tired look like any other random person on the street just doing their best, and she greeted me cordially, politely, like we were pleasant acquaintances at most. The house was nauseating. A bit messy, but nothing much, same as it always was. Same old beige paint in the living room that felt like I was twelve years old and helpless and sinking again. How was that feeling so viscerally woven into every surface? It was like depression was spun into fabric and everything in the house was stitched out of oppressive memory.
