I make a snack of apple and peanut butter, shoot Gabe a text to let him know what a good time I had.
You’re okay, too, for a speck, he texts me back, and I giggle. With Gabe I never feel like a walking, talking letdown. With Gabe I just feel like me.
So why can’t I stop thinking about his brother?
I finish my apple and take Oscar out into the yard for a while, pushing the image of Patrick and Tess disappearing into the tent out of my mind and telling myself I’m being melancholy and dumb. I make a list of projects to tackle when I head back to work in the morning. Finally, I dig my phone out of my pocket.
How’s the rash?I text Patrick, just teasing.
He doesn’t text back.
Day 37
He does the next morning, though:itchy, he reports, just the one word and no punctuation. A couple of minutes later, though:how’s the burn?
I grin down at my phone, feeling silly and glad.Burn-y, I reply.
Day 38
My mom’s got an aloe plant, he texts while I’m filing invoices in Penn’s office.Could come by and get some if you still look like a lobster.
I don’t, not really; the worst of the burn’s faded, is beginning to peel away like so many layers of snakeskin, like I’m becoming something entirely new. All I can do is deal with the grossness and wait for whatever’s underneath.
Still:will do, I text him back, no hesitation.When’s good?
Day 39
I don’t know what it means that Patrick tells me to come over at a time I know Gabe’s working at the pizza shop—just that he doesn’t want anything to do with his brother, maybe, or possibly nothing at all.
“Hey,” he says, letting me in the feeble side door—it felt strange to knock on the frame and then wait for him, how I used to barge right in and sneak bites of whatever Chuck was making in the kitchen, usually something with lentils or whole-wheat flour. Patrick’s barefoot in his shredded old jeans. His hair’s grown out a little since he’s been back in Star Lake and he looks a bit more like I remember, some of those sharp edges filed off. “Come on in.”
“Sure,” I say, stepping past him into the dark, empty house, the familiar smells of dust and wood and sunlight. “Hey.” Pilot hauls himself up off the floor and comes across the room to wag his hello. It makes me feel sort of disproportionately happy that he remembers me somewhere at the back of his loyal canine brain, like maybe in some alternate universe I’m still part of this family after all. “Hey, Pilot. Hey, boy.”
“His hips are going,” Patrick says quietly, reaching down to scratch behind Pilot’s affable, furry ears. “He’s ten; he can’t really do stairs anymore. My mom rigged up a little step-stool thing so he can get up on the couch.”
I look down at Pilot, who’s panting cheerfully. His muzzle’s gone a silvery-gray. I remember when the Donnellys brought him back from the ASPCA, wriggly and wormy—Patrick and I rolled around in the yard with him anyway, muddy and covered in grass stains. Julia didn’t want anything to do with any of us. Gabe was off with his friends, I think. “Shoot, I didn’t know.”
Patrick shrugs. “Yeah, I can see how that’s the kind of thing my brother wouldn’t have told you,” he says, giving Pilot a final rub and heading for the kitchen door.
That stings. “Patrick—” I start.
“Aloe’s in the sunroom,” he interrupts me. “Come on.”
“Sure.” I follow him through the hallway, past the creaky staircase and into the bright, airy sunroom that Connie’s filled with fiddle-leaf fig and cacti, an enormous and vaguely terrifying spider plant that’s been holding court next to the picture window since I was a little girl. There’s a bright patterned rug spread over the floor, oranges and reds. Patrick picks a pair of scissors out of a jar on the bookshelf—one is encouraged to prune, if one is going to spend time in here—and snips a couple lengths of aloe off the plant.
“Thanks,” I tell Patrick quietly—our fingers brush as he hands me the aloe, this stupid useless shiver I feel all over my body. Way before anything romantic ever happened between us Patrick and I were always touching-friends, his arm slung around my shoulders or our palms pressed together to see whose hand was bigger. It used to make me feel reassured, when I bothered to think about it at all, a way of orienting myself in space, like running your hand along the wall in a dark room. Now even this much contact feels foreign and strange.
For Patrick, too, apparently: “I’ll get you a baggie,” he says, clearing his throat and heading back toward the kitchen, leaving me alone in the sunlight and green.
Day 40
Imogen invites me over to have my cards read, which is how I know I’m really forgiven; I head over after work with two slices of the Lodge’s midnight chocolate cake and a CD of a singer-songwriter Penn turned me on to, this new chick from Brooklyn who plays the slide guitar. The night’s summer-cool, the sky over the lake a toasted rose gold. It rained this afternoon, quick and violent, and the road is still shiny and wet.
I haven’t been to Imogen’s house much since I got back here, a cottage off a side road not far from the high school, full of crystals and an altar to the Goddess set up in the front room. It smells like vanilla and patchouli oil, familiar. “Well, hey, Molly,” her mother says when she answers the door in a pair of flowy pants she’s had as long as I’ve known her; her hair’s different, though, pure white and cropped short around her face. I remember what Imogen told me about the cancer, and I squeeze her long and tight to say hello.
I grab two forks from the kitchen and head up the back staircase to Imogen’s room, where she’s putting the finishing touches on a huge brush script painting she’s working on, twenty-four by forty-eight inches that just saysEASY DOES IT. “Not bad advice,” I say.
“I like to think so.” Imogen grins, dunking her paintbrush into a mason jar full of water and motioning toward the bed. There’s a picture of her and Tess in their graduation gowns tucked into the mirror. Her RISD sweatshirt’s slung over the chair. “You ready?Ooh, you brought cake, huh?”
