12. Reed
Reed
Reed
“I think they’re both done.”
I glance over to where Abbie has two canvases propped on the armchairs. It’s New Year’s Eve—our last night here—and in the past days, when we haven’t been hiking or lazing or reading, she’s been busy painting, putting in as many hours as I have been writing.
But not adding to a thrift store canvas. Instead she took two of the canvases she’d brought and completely painted over them. So both of these paintings are all hers.
She’s quiet as I look. I don’t need her to tell me what they are. One for her sister. One for her mom. Though they aren’t the subjects. They aren’t portraits. Instead one is red and raw, skin that’s been constantly picked at. The other a room that almost echoes with a sense of emptiness.
“Do you intend to give these to them?”
“Probably not.” She smiles a little, as if imagining their reactions. “It’s just…therapy.”
I kiss her for that. She laughs against my mouth before turning to regard the paintings again, her eyes gleaming with a mischievous light. “Should we leave them for Harris? Next to your books?”
“As a thank you for letting us stay?”
She wrinkles her nose. “He might not appreciate the bloody one.”
“I would. If you don’t want them, I’ll buy them.” And have another part of her with me. It’s a constant ache, not knowing whether a few paintings will be all that I have of her after today. “I’ve already started a collection.”
She leans into me, resting her head against my shoulder. “I think I’ll hold onto them for a little while. I do love the thrift store ones. But it felt good to use the entire canvas again. To make something fully mine. I’d forgotten how good.” With a heavy sigh she adds, “And having them around might help me remember why I need to stand firm. When I’m in the middle of it.”
Of all the shit she’s about to go through. “I hate that you’ll have to go through that.”
“I do, too. But…I have to.”
She’s staring at her mother’s painting. And though she doesn’t say a word, I can tell that she’s hurting.
“Abbie?”
“I know you said you don’t love your father. What do you feel for him?”
“Frustration. Revulsion.”
“There’s no respect left at all?”
“No. Do you think I should?”
She shakes her head, then exhales a shaky breath. “I just…I don’t know if I love my mother anymore. And it feels like I’m such a bad person for even saying it. I care, because how can I not? But there’s no respect left. And no trust. It seems that all that’s left in me is a sense of duty and obligation—and even that , she’s broken. And she’s not someone I ever want to be around. There’s still the relief that I have reason to make her go, but this. This. Not loving her anymore. It feels just…as if I’m so horrible.”
“Do you think I’m horrible for not loving my father?”
With the back of her hand, she wipes her eyes. “No.”
“Then give yourself the same clemency as you do me, Abbie girl. What about your sister?”
She pulls in a deep breath, visibly calming herself. “I still love her. Maybe there’s just more there to begin with.”
“Will you be giving her the option to stay with you?”
“No,” she say, and I have to conceal my relief. Because it’s not my decision but it was the one I hoped Abbie would make. “Because everything she does is still so hurtful. I don’t want to live with that. And it’s not like I’m kicking her out in the street. She’ll still have a place with my mom.” She blows out a breath that puffs her cheeks. “And I think I’ll always hope, because I would like my sister as a friend again. You know she wasn’t always so negative?”
“No?”
“And I’ve thought on it a lot more since I vented to you last week. Thinking about why she became this way.”
“So what did you come up with?”
“I think she retreated into hating everything because it’s safe. Isn’t it? If you like something or love something, you can be hurt. Disappointed. And that goes for so many things. Those favorite books you have as a kid, then you find out the author’s a bigot or a sleaze. And if you like someone’s music? Well fuck, he’s a rapist. And that politician you supported and voted for now backs down on every issue he campaigned on, never puts up a fight now that he’s in office, never calls out the political bullshit that should be called out. So if Lauryn hates everything, well…instead of being disappointed, she’s just proven right when something turns out shitty. And it protects her from being judged the way she judges other people.”
“Sounds like a pretty fucking unhappy way to live.”
“It does. And if it’s true, I feel bad for her…but protecting herself doesn’t excuse how she so carelessly hurts me while doing it.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Nothing could fucking excuse it. But she’s not my sister…and I could imagine taking a whole lot of shit from Harris before making that break.
“Though I understand the need to retreat. Obviously, since I’m here. No one has the energy to always fight. Everyone has to recharge. But then you have to try again—not just stay where it’s easy to stay.”
“So you’re saying cynicism and negativity is for cowards and weaklings,” I say to make her laugh.
And she does, bumping against my side. “Not everything negative. There’s nothing wrong with expressing an opinion or not liking something—though of course there’s always a time and place. And things that hurt other people should be called out. Not all cynicism is bad, either. Only when there’s no attempt at anything else. And it has its place, too. Like, I’d be a complete fool to think that, after I tell my mom that I caught her out in her lies— Well, she learned her lesson and she’ll never do that again! But hope in general isn’t foolish. I think hope takes far more courage than cynicism does.”
“What of love? Love takes more courage, too, yeah?”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Are you thinking of your book?”
“A little.” I always am, a little—which Abbie picked up on days ago. I know she’s not offended now because she likes it when I bounce ideas off her. “Because I like that as a theme: Blanket cynicism and negativity is a coward’s refuge. That might be what she’s truly fighting against. A monster is never enough. There has to be something else, the thing that’s the real horror—or what that horror represents. But I’ll have to work out how. Either she’ll be fighting her own cynicism or it’ll be someone else who is the cynic, someone who has more power than she does. But she has enough strength to hope and love, so she uses that strength to win. Or maybe hope and love give her strength. Something.”
“It sounds like it’ll be a good fight.”
Fuck, my chest keeps knotting up. Because I’m hoping, too.
“I think it will be,” I tell her.
I don’t want this to end. Yet the New Year’s crawling closer. I hold Abbie in my lap with her head against my shoulder—we’ve both got real comfortable with this position over the past week—and battle everything within me. Everything that wants to hold her tighter and tighter.
Because she’s told me what’s coming. She has to go back. She has to clean house. She has to withstand all the shit they’re going to throw at her over the next two months. Maybe longer. And although I want—fucking need —to stand with her, to help her through, it’s got to be her choice. Because me being there might make everything a million fucking times worse for her.
So I wait. And I hope.
“Did you plan anything specific for New Year’s,” I ask her, and my throat feels raw and thick.
“No.” Her breath against my neck is the sweetest damn thing. “No fireworks, for obvious reasons. I don’t like champagne. I think there’s some old tradition of opening the door to let the old year out and the new year in, so I suppose we could do that.”
“Let a year into Harris’s cabin?”
I feel her smile against my throat. “Symbolically.”
“What did you do last year?”
“I volunteered to be Harris’s plus one at the Bennet gala, because I was avoiding home.”
“The year before that?”
“I was in bed, binge-watching…I think it was The Last of Us .”
“That sounds real close to what I did. I might have already been asleep when it hit midnight.”
“Well, I’ve never been kissed at midnight on New Year’s Eve, so that’s what you’re doing tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She laughs, then lifts her head. “What is Hot Biscuit Slim looking at?”
At the window. It’s too late for it to be birds.
Abbie uncurls from my lap and I follow her over, looking out.
“Oh,” she breathes softly. “Are those deer?”
“Elk.” In the clearing, bathed in moonlight.
Watching them, she reaches down and entwines her fingers with mine. “It might hurt your professional ego to hear, but nature is the very best structural engineer.”
“I happen to agree. What about Paul Bunyan, though—making those rivers?”
“He’s a close second to nature.”
“Then I won’t argue against that, either. But what made you think of it?”
“Looking at the elk. Which made me start thinking of meese legs?—”
“Meese legs?”
“Yeah. A moose has four legs, so it’s a plural number of legs, so meese legs.”
Her straight face never breaks. “All right,” I tell her. “Go on.”
“Well, the fat cells in their legs are mostly unsaturated, so they don’t harden so easily at low temperatures. The cells don’t line up in their orderly crystals or bricks or whatever, so they don’t freeze unless it’s really, really cold. I don’t know if elk are the same. Maybe? Probably something similar. And I just think it’s amazing.”
She is amazing. The way she watches the world, looking for all the wonder in it. And my heart’s aching so fucking bad. I think I know what love is now. And understand why it’s so hard to pull out of the components. It’s made up of too many words, none of them exactly precise, but all of them right.
I cup her face in my hands, capture her mouth in a brief, soft kiss.
“Is it midnight?” she whispers.
“I’ll still be kissing you then. Though not only on your mouth.” I sweep her up, carry her across the cabin. “This will be the last condom. Though I don’t know how you’ll top the eleven fuckers sucking.”
“With a dozen cunts a-coming, of course.”
Of course. I kiss her, then kiss her again. The last one. It won’t be enough. It can’t be enough. One last night won’t get me through a week, let alone the rest of my life. But it won’t be the last.
I’ll have hope.