CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
ou’re still cold,” George says when I park the car at the resort. My“Y
arms are covered in goose bumps.
“A bit.”
“Let’s warm you up.” The way he says it, kind of low and scratchy, changes the temperature.
My lips part as I envision George and me tangled in rose petals.
Suddenly, I’m aware of how close we are, and I can’t think of anything except the taste of rain on his lips. I stare at the strong line of his throat, and the urge to press my mouth there has me jumping to my feet.
“Not like that,” he says.
“I know. I think I’ll go for the hot tub.”
“Great.”
“On my own,” I add.
“Yup.”
My phone rings the moment we step inside the villa. I look at the screen and am about to send it to voicemail when George says, “You should answer it.”
So I put the phone to my ear and say “Hi, Mom.” With those two words, any lingering sexual tension vanishes into the fog.
“Hi, honey. I’m just calling to see how you’re doing.”
“I’m fine,” I lie.
George is concentrating carefully on taking off his hiking boots. “And
how’s George?”
“George is also fine.”
“Hi, Rebecca,” he pipes.
“I’ll put you on speaker so you can talk to him yourself,” I tell her, setting the phone on the kitchen counter.
I take off my wet shoes and socks and sit curled in the armchair by the fire, listening as my mother and George chat. I’m impressed by how normal he sounds. I feel like I’ve lost the ground beneath my feet. He fills her in on surfing and our meal last night, and not for the first time, I wonder if it could ever be that easy between her and me. She listens and laughs, and when she says “Oh, I’m so envious of you two. I wish I were there,” I know she means it.
After they say goodbye, George takes a yogurt from the fridge and eats it in three spoonfuls.
“You could try a little harder,” he says gently.
“Not this again,” I say. I don’t know how many times we’ve argued about my mom. It’s the same thing over and over. George defends her and reminds me how I’m lucky to have two parents who love me, and I feel like an utter wretch.
“Your mom is great,” George says, crossing the room. “She’s a good listener, and she makes the best desserts. That apple-berry crisp…”
“I know. The woman can bake.”
George sits on the coffee table in front of me, his knees bracketing my legs, creating a safe space. “I wish you could find a way to forgive her,” he says. “She loves you.”
During the year and a half that Mom was gone, she called and wrote letters. She sent presents. When she phoned, my brothers and I would line up to speak with her. First Darwin, then Moby, then me. She came back to visit at Christmas, and for ten days, I basked in her warmth. Everything was better when Mom was home. My dad smiled more, my brothers were nicer to me, and even the house smelled better, filled with the aroma of cinnamon buns and gingersnap cookies. I convinced myself that if I was on my absolute best behavior, she wouldn’t want to leave again. But she did. Watching her station wagon disappear down Old Stone Road was harder than when she’d slipped away at night. After that, I stopped talking to her on the phone, and when my
brothers visited her out east, I refused to go. I wanted to punish her for caring more about whales than she did about us.
“I know you mean well,” I tell George. “But you need to accept that she and I are never going to be besties.”
When we were teenagers, there were a few years when I was an absolute asshole to my mom. The way I spoke to her was so full of loathing that thinking of it gives me a full-body cringe. George always called me out on it, and we fought about it regularly. My father shut me down when I went too far, but my mom never did. It wasn’t until Mimi gave me a lecture about my appalling behavior that I smartened up. But the eight-year-old girl who woke up to find her mom missing and the nine-year-old who screamed for her mother on her birthday still feel close to me.
“Who said anything about besties?” George asks.
“We’re fine the way we are,” I say, my face growing hot. “I’m over it. It’s not like I’m still angry.”
George leans forward, his elbows on his knees and his fingers linked, and he pins me with those steely blue eyes. Unable to look away, I tilt closer, as if I’m being pulled on a fishing line.
“I think you are angry,” George says. “I think you’re so angry, you might burst with it one day.”
My breath falters; my heart is racing. I keep trying to stamp down my emotions while George coaxes me to set them free. This is what it’s like to be truly known by someone. George sees me, even when I don’t want to see myself.
“It’s not just that she left,” I say quietly. She left me and she changed.
George looks at me, and it’s like he can read my mind because he says, “The woman who went away when you were eight and came back when you were nine will always be your mother. She’ll always love you.” George’s eyes flicker with sadness, and I know he’s thinking about his own mom. “If you gave her a chance—if you talked to her—she might not seem like such a mystery. You’ll never be able to forgive her, or have a real relationship with her, if you don’t discuss what happened.”
“Have you forgiven your dad?” I ask, searching his eyes.
I’ve met George’s father only twice. Like George’s mother, Beau was a successful architect, but he had a gambling problem and it spun out of control after Lily died. He showed up to the Big House one day when we were sixteen. George stormed out as soon as he saw him standing on the doorstep with a black eye, but I stayed behind and spied from the hallway. I listened as Beau told Mimi about a recent run of bad luck. He just needed a little financial boost to get back on track and then he’d come for George. I peered around the corner as Mimi wrote him a check and told her son to get out. And then I listened to Mimi cry. I’ve never told George what I overheard.
George and I were living in Toronto the last time we saw his dad. After that visit, George started speaking about him in the past tense, as if he were dead.
“I’m working on it,” George says now. “I spend a lot of time talking about him in therapy. I’d like to accept that he wasn’t able to care for me after my mother died, that he didn’t put me first and caused harm with his choices. I think he tried his best when I went to live with him in Montreal, but his grief and the gambling didn’t leave room for him to be a good parent.
There’s a lot to unravel…” He swallows. “But I don’t want to operate from a place of hurt. I want to leave space for the good memories.”
“He’s the one who lost out. You know that now, right?”
“I know it rationally speaking,” he says. “I’m still trying to feel that it’s true.”
“What about your mom?” I ask. “Do you talk about her, too?” It’s difficult for George to speak about Lily without his throat catching, but he keeps a photo of her in his wallet. She’s holding a young, beaming George by the hands, spinning him in a circle, his feet off the ground. George resembles his dad, but his smile—his real smile—is just like his mom’s.
“Yeah. It’s harder, though. Whenever I talk about her, I feel like I’m losing her all over again.”
“She was lucky,” I tell him. “She was so lucky to have you.”
He swallows again. And it takes everything in me not to reach for him.
“I wish you could have met her.” It’s not the first time he’s said it.
“So do I.” And I do, so badly. I want to tell her how perfect her son is, and how much we all love him. My entire family. It will never be enough to make up for what he’s lost, but I want to tell her how much I’ve tried.
“I wish she could have met you,” he says, holding my gaze. This is something new. The confession and the way he’s looking at me.
I take George’s hand in mine. I feel his heart beating in my palm. “Me too.”
We stare at each other for a moment longer, and then I let go.
• • •
I SIT IN the hot tub’s bubbling water, my back to the villa, watching the ocean throw itself against the rocky point. Even though I can’t see George, he’s everywhere. On my lips, my tongue, my mind. We’ve had time and space to grow up and apart, but what if we were meant to come back to each other in a new way? What if we’re fighting something we shouldn’t?
There’s no one I enjoy spending time with more than George. There’s nobody who makes me feel as bold as George does. I am fully myself with him. And that kiss. Kissing George was like stepping inside a house I’d never seen but somehow knew was home. All the static in my head went quiet, as if I’d found the right frequency on a radio dial.
I text Aurora when George takes his turn in the hot tub.
Me: I kissed George.
Aurora: YOU DID WHAAAAT?
Me: Or maybe he kissed me? Either way, we definitely kissed.
Aurora: I’m calling right now, and you’re answering.
“This is not a text message conversation,” Aurora says when I pick up.
“This is a call your damn friend and leave no detail unaccounted for conversation.”
“I wasn’t sure if you were with a client.”
“Nope. I’ve got fifteen minutes until my next appointment, so you better start talking. Or is he nearby?”
“He’s outside in the hot tub.” We were awkward with each other when we passed in our bathing suits. How does one treat one’s lifelong best friend when she finds out he uses his tongue like it’s his fucking job?
“Why are you talking to me?” Aurora screeches. “This is your Bachelor hot tub date. Get out there.”
“George and I sort of agreed to forget about the kiss. I’m not sure seminudity and steam are wise.”
“Bah. Fine. Let’s back up. Tell me everything.”
When I finish giving Aurora the play-by-play, she sighs. “I love love.”
“I didn’t say anything about love. I said I have feelings for George.”
“I guess the question is whether you want to spend the rest of your life keeping your feelings in check?”
“I’m not sure I can. But I don’t want to ruin our friendship, either. He means everything to me.”
I can hear her smile. “Imagine if he meant even more.”
• • •
LATE IN THE afternoon, I take a walk along the beach by myself and fill a container with salal berries that grow in the shrubbery by the shore. I need to keep myself busy. I need to create.
My mom is the baker, but I found the precise measurements and the need to follow instructions confining. I fell in love with cooking because it felt like music. Once you knew the basics, you were free to improvise, to experiment, to taste and adjust to your liking. A good recipe is a song—you can sing it a little out of tune and it’s still good. Sometimes, it’s even better.
George once described a productive writing session as a flow, a sort of magical state when his mind goes quiet and the words come almost from nowhere, right through his body, and onto the page. He’s barely aware he’s thinking, that he’s making conscious decisions as to what adjective to use or what material to include. The commas go where they’re supposed to. The
sentences grow into paragraphs like a plant until he’s created a blossoming garden. That’s not how it feels when I’m cooking. When I’m in the kitchen, I’m in control. And I desperately need that feeling right now.
Once I’ve foraged enough berries, I drive into Tofino and pop into Naas Foods, a seafood market I’d spotted yesterday. I find fresh halibut, lingcod, Chinook and coho salmon, as well as live crab and candied salmon. The storekeeper tells me about their commitment to sustainability. George would be impressed. I buy a piece of coho, a plank of cedar, and a jar of smoked kelp flakes, harvested right here from the Clayoquot Sound, to experiment with.
As soon as I begin making dinner, George comes to my side, the way he always has, ready to clean up after me. But I shoo him away. I need some space. The meal I prepare is simple. I make a sauce with the berries, the zest of a lemon along with its juice, and a little sugar and pepper, and I roast the salmon on the cedar plank in the oven. George reads in the living room, and every so often, his eyes will find mine and awareness pings between us.
I think of all the meals we’ve shared together, first when I was learning to cook with my mom and all the evenings we spent in the kitchen later as roommates. I think of the linguini we were making the night George told me he was moving out, and the ravioli we made when he returned after the fires.
The dinner party I held at Nate’s house. A lifetime of stories told through food.
I plate our meals carefully. The pink fillets of salmon, the dark purple sauce. Yellow pattypan squash and rice pilaf. The colors are remarkable. I picture it then, a spread in a cookbook. Photos of a wild shoreline. An illustration of salal berries. A recipe of my own. I take a photo, and I almost send it to Brie, the way I usually do when I’ve prepared something I’m excited about, but I decide not to. I create a new photo album on my phone called MINE and save it there.
George and I barely speak as we eat—the food is that good, and after everything that happened earlier, I’m not sure what’s left to say. But when his foot accidentally nudges mine under the table, our eyes meet, and I don’t think I’m imagining the heat in his gaze.
We go for a walk on the beach afterward. Fog lies in a thick coverlet over the cove, obscuring the shoreline, so it looks like nothing lies beyond the beach but heaven’s white clouds. We don’t mention the kiss, but it’s like we’re sharing secrets in our glances. Neither of us has forgotten a thing.
Back at the villa, we open the windows so the air smells of fresh rain and spruce. We read in silence until George announces that he’ll be spending the night on the couch. I don’t put up a fight. We say good night and I climb the stairs to the bedroom. Halfway up, I pause and watch George spread a blanket over the sofa. My mind leaps into the future. There are only two more full days before we have to part ways. Loss grips my throat. Even if we never kiss again, I don’t want to go back to the way things were. I don’t want to go months at a time without seeing each other. I don’t want to drift apart.
“George?”
He stops what he’s doing and looks up at me.
“What if it’s not a bad idea?” I ask.
“What if what’s not a bad idea?”
I take a breath. “Us.”
He doesn’t answer, and I can’t tell what’s running through his mind. I’m not going to push it, though. If I’m confused, he’s allowed to be, too.
“Just a thought,” I say. And then I take myself to bed.
