24. Healing Takes Time
Healing Takes Time
HENRY
When I woke up, there was a dead bird laid out like an offering in the entryway to my bedroom. The odious smell hit me before the shock did.
The shock was not just over the bird carcass, though that was a huge, mangled part of it. It was bigger than that. It was so big that I had to shut the door, press my back into the wood, and coach my breathing down to a manageable pace.
This was my life, and I had orchestrated its undoing, one bad decision at a time.
The birdcage door stood wide open when I found the bravery to exit my room.
Topher purred innocently from his favorite spot on the armrest. Hoda and Jenna talked about how to combat the post-Christmas blues on the TV.
“I hope you had your fun because you are in so much trouble,” I said to Topher before sneezing.
There were no signs of Aidan anywhere.
I sneezed again. I was also allergic to missing him, clearly.
I stood in the center of the living room for several minutes trying to figure out what to do, where to start. I couldn’t stand still. I couldn’t let another piece of my universe peel away from me.
Eventually, I grabbed the rubber gloves from under the sink and two plastic bags from the plastic bag of plastic bags I kept in the pantry, though I wished I had a hazmat suit to handle this revolting mess.
“Rest in peace, Pickles,” I said, wrapping him up. I never wanted a pet bird, but I mourned the lost opportunity anyway as I brought his contorted corpse down to the trash can. I paused for a second at the bin. Should I get a shoebox and give him a proper burial?
Two joggers whizzed by in athleisure, wishing me a hasty “Happy holidays.”
I waved to them with the hand the bag was in, and it slipped out of my grasp, skittering across the concrete patio. Any chance for a dignified bird funeral had surely been lost by that point. I dropped Pickles in the trash can with a timid, “Sorry.”
Upstairs, I washed my hands seven times and threw out my gloves.
I glared at Topher from the chair in the corner, wishing there was a way to punish him that he would understand.
But in fairness, this all sort of felt like my own personal punishment.
A cat I was allergic to, a dead bird, and a man I wished into existence now gone missing. Nothing in life could be simple.
I was in the middle of leaving Aidan my umpteenth voicemail when the buzzer went off. Alexa’s voice crackled out of the intercom. My fight died alongside Pickles, so I let her up.
She had the decency to appear apologetic as she shuffled across the threshold with a big lumpy bag over her shoulder. She asked, “What’s that smell?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know.” I got her a cup of coffee, which she took black, and we settled in the living room. As soon as I shut off the TV, Topher made himself scarce, which was fine by me because looking at the furry murderer made me want to cry a little.
“Is that new?” Alexa asked, nodding toward the artificial pear tree I’d assembled last night and set beside the now-empty birdcage.
All I did was nod, unable to explain. She stared for a long time into the dark surface of her drink before speaking.
“I’m sorry about how you found out Isla’s Attic was closing.
Aunt Isla decided last week. You visit her all the time.
I genuinely assumed she’d told you. But I guess I should’ve known better given how chipper you seemed when you arrived yesterday. ”
I exhaled through my nostrils and shrugged, uninterested in rebutting my own dramatic nature.
She barreled through the silence, producing a box from her bag. “I meant to give you this last night but then Aidan proposed and— Where is Aidan, anyway? I brought him his coat.”
I took the box from her hands and ignored her question. Tearing away the wrapping paper, I could already tell what was inside. Soap. It would always and forever be soap with her. Except my heart bobbed up into my throat when I pulled back the tissue paper.
Each soap bar was monogrammed with a letter and arranged to read: MAN OF HONOR ?
Confusion scrunched up my face. “Really?” I asked. “Me?”
“Duh,” she said. “But you can say no if you want to.”
“No.”
“No, as in ‘no, you don’t want to’?”
“Yes.”
She rocked back, hurt.
“No! ‘No’ as in ‘No, I don’t want to say no.’”
She squinted. “Is that a ‘yes’?”
I nodded so my words couldn’t spin a messier web. “I’m just confused, is all.”
“I know we haven’t been close since I started dating Sid and that’s mostly my fault.
I knew how his friends treated you back in the day, but I always assumed you were above all that.
That you saw their immaturity for what it was,” she said.
“Even I wanted to write him off as a boneheaded jock when he came up to me in the bar that first night, but then I realized how much he’d changed since high school and how invested he was in his soap business, and I let myself get wrapped up in all of it at the expense of everything else. I’m sorry.”
I shrugged again, but it had less oomph behind it.
“I still consider you my best friend, Hen. I’m sure it looks like Sid and I were gunning for you and the store, but the truth of it is…
being in love and in business together is hard,” she said, setting her mug down because she needed both of her hands to gesticulate.
“Planning a wedding is expensive. Planning to have a kid is expensive. Majorly so. My parents are going to do the best they can to help pay for stuff, but we need to pull our weight, and the kiosk and the online shop sales aren’t going to cut it.
We’ve invested too much time and capital into this business to let it fail.
We need the summer profits a brick-and-mortar location would bring. ”
I nodded this time, digesting this information along with long sips of coffee. “I understand.”
“Isla was ready to let go but you were being so resistant. I was afraid you’d hate me,” she admitted.
“Hate you ? I thought you hated me,” I said. “There was you dating Sid. Then there was the whole thing with the spinach-and-artichoke dip.”
“What whole thing with the spinach-and-artichoke dip?”
“You telling me to make it when you’d already made it, and better,” I said.
“Your mom made that. I told you. It was a slipup. I genuinely forgot I told you both to make it,” she said.
I deflated. “Oh. It… it just always seemed like you were judging me.”
“I thought you were judging me. For picking Sid. For going into soap,” she said. “Soap. I can’t believe my life is fats and oils.”
“I… I was judging you.” If we were clearing the air, I needed to roll in the industrial honesty fan. “Shit. I’m sorry. I think I was judging you because you found someone—someone I disliked, at that—and that made me the odd man out. The single one.”
“Nobody in the family has ever judged you for your relationship status. Besides, you and Isla? You’re a package. I think most of us are jealous. We grew up without a matriarch and she was the closest thing we had. She’s the uncrackable nut and yet you found a way to open her up.”
“Did you just call me a nutcracker?”
“I think I did?” she said. “I’ve always been jealous of your relationship with Aunt Isla. My mom has zero relationship with her parents. I love Grandpa Aster, but let’s be honest, he’s a piece of work. Not the best to be around when you need sage, elderly advice.”
“Unless it’s about hunting.”
“Unless it’s about hunting, exactly.”
“I never realized.”
“I didn’t want to be all sappy and shit over it. People grow apart. Even family,” she said weakly. “But I don’t want that to be us. People can change.”
I offered a growing-in-strength smile. “I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks. I’m happy for me, too. Sid makes me happy. I hope you’ll give him a chance,” she said, then peered up through her long eyelashes. “Does Aidan make you happy?”
My stomach flipped. “He does.”
“Then why did you—”
She didn’t even get her whole piercing question out before I spilled my guts.
Everything. All of it. The wish. The magic.
The shop. I skipped the sex, but damn had I been thinking a lot about that, too.
I ended with a brief eulogy for Pickles.
Though I didn’t know him long, I wished him well in his avian afterlife.
I raced to my room and returned with the red card that still glowed, still vibrated.
Alexa blinked at me for an indeterminate period while clutching the card.
Either she was contemplating how to have me committed immediately or she was processing at her own pace.
After a large intake of breath, she nearly dropped her coffee as she said, “I knew it!”
That was not the reaction I was expecting. “Wind that back. You… knew it?”
“I didn’t know it–know it. I felt it. The morning after Small Business Saturday, I could sense something was off.
The store felt… different. Charged, almost. You know I have bat-like hearing.
I swore I’d heard a human rustling around in the back and then it was a mannequin?
It wasn’t adding up. Then we ran into you at the mall, and I had this overwhelming feeling that something wasn’t right,” she said.
“Plus, I always found something uncanny about the mannequins in Isla’s store. Like there were souls hidden in them.”
“Someone once said, ‘Art is the stored honey of the human soul.’”
Alexa mouthed the word “mannequin” to herself. “Even the word: ‘mannequin.’ Man-space-akin. Something akin to a man. Is now… a man.”
“But he only gets to stay that way until New Year’s Eve unless he experiences true human love,” I explained.
“Do you love him?” she asked.
“I told him I didn’t. That I couldn’t.”
“Was that the truth?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Bad answer.”
“I think I could love him! I’m just… scared,” I admitted, for the first time truly acknowledging why I’d run off, why I’d made those barbs. “What if it’s not enough? Not enough to keep him human, and not enough to make him stay.”