Yes, Dad, I’m sure. No, Dad, I’m not leaving Henderson yet. Yes, I love Nick. Yes, I’m still going to NYU.Just not this year.
Her father finally gave up and went to bed, shaking his head. Aubrey stayed up to polish off the beer, wishing she had access to a phone. She wanted to tell Nick about the way the alcohol made her thoughts shimmer at the edges. Had he ever been tipsy before? What was he even doing right now? Not suffering through too much contact with his father, she hoped. Most likely, he was lying in bed, dreaming about her.
In the morning, Aubrey woke in a cold sweat. Her head pounded. Her stomach heaved like a rollicking sea. And someone had apparently taken a hammer to her bones overnight.
She staggered into the kitchen to find her parents leaning over the breakfast table, conferring in low tones. They jerked apart at her entrance.
Aubrey didn’t stop to wonder why. She just lurched across the room, leaned over the sink, and puked her guts out.
Chairs clattered. Within moments, her mother had her hair pulled back and a soothing hand traveling up and down her back. “Are you okay?”
Aubrey finished up and spat bile into the sink, clinging to the lip in an effort to keep her legs from giving out. “I don’t know. I think I’m hungover. I mean, is this what a hangover’s like? Can you evenbehungover from one beer?”
“I don’t think so.” Her mother’s hand found her forehead. “Oh, honey, you’re burning up. No, this is something else. You look like you have the flu.”
Aubrey swayed. Her whole body had gone into revolt. “In July?”
“It happens.” Her mother spoke with the stoic certainty of a nurse with twenty years’ experience behind her. “Come on, let’s get you back to bed.”
Aubrey did, in fact, have the flu. A fact she only admitted to herself once she’d spent the entire day bed-ridden and aching, lashed by fever and wondering what she possibly could have done to invite such punishment.
Her mother stayed at the cabin with her. After calling to extend the rental, her father headed back to Henderson, having already used his vacation days. Aubrey grasped at his hand before he left, begging from amid the sweat-dampened sheets. “Nick will come looking for me. You’ll tell him I’m here, right? That I’m coming back soon?”
“Oh, sweetheart.” He swept a damp tendril away from her forehead. There was something in the way he looked at her. Something vast and pointed and frightening.
Probably just the fever spiking again. An hour ago, Aubrey had watched a swarm of black butterflies amass on the ceiling.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said.
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
Her relief lasted only moments before misery wiped her mind clean of anything but the sickness.
Aubrey barely slept. For eight days, she thrashed from one contorted position to another, racked by heat and a cough so deep it tore at her lungs.
The world continued, somehow. Her mother brought soup and crackers that went ignored, and folded-up ice-water washcloths that didn’t. When the fever finally relinquished its grip, Aubrey slept for sixteen hours straight, then woke on a bright, sun-soaked Thursday morning with a miraculously clear head. Grit clogged her eyes and her chest ached, but the storm inside her had subsided.
She wriggled out of the sweat-soured sheets and stumbled to the kitchen. A pan of scrambled eggs sat on the stove. Beside the coiled burner, a platter offered triangles of toast slathered inbutter. She piled a plate high and scarfed enough food to make her wasted stomach press against the elastic waistband of her pajama shorts. When she looked up, her mother leaned against the doorway, fondness in her eyes.
“You survived.”
“Barely,” Aubrey croaked.
“Are you ready to go home?”
“God, yes.” She hadn’t seen Nick in over two weeks. It felt like a lifetime. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Her mother drove. On the way, Aubrey dozed, and the extra sleep restored her even further. When Henderson came into view, she peered past her smiling reflection to the hulking steel mill that would watch over her for another year.
She’d run the gauntlet. Descended to hell, fought through, and clawed her way back. Now her father had no choice but to take her decision at face value. Because she would not, under any circumstances, allow life to come between her and Nick Thacker.
Of course, Aubrey had no way to know, then, that it already had.
26.
On Saturday night, Nick took Jackson to seeMoulin Rouge.
