Chapter 12
Chapter 12
Evelyn materialized the morning after the strip-chess incident, looking as if she’d gotten lost on her way to a rave. “Hey, y’all,” she called out as she waltzed into the den.
Scarlett had barricaded herself behind a pile of notebooks and her chess board. Jaime was pointedly not on his couch across from her. Instead, he was typing furiously on his laptop at a folding card table across the room.
Ev took in the nonstandard setup and then quirked a brow at Scarlett, as if to say What’s up with this?
Scarlett could only shrug. It wasn’t as if she could explain how and why she’d pissed in the punch bowl.
Ev turned to her brother. “Mom wanted me to let you know that the guy showed up to clean the gutter yesterday.”
“Good.” Jaime offered this without glancing up from his computer. “I didn’t want to have to fire him and find someone else.”
Because that was yet another thing he was taking care of for someone else.
“And”—Evelyn turned to Scarlett—“I’d said I wanted to take you to see my art. I know you two are mostly done, so if you’re free today, I thought we could—”
“Yes!” Scarlett nearly yelled, cutting off the end of Ev’s question. Scarlett had never needed to get out of the house for some air more in her life. “Let me grab a sweater.”
Jaime shot his sister a look. “I think she’s trying to get away from me.”
Of course Scarlett wanted to bolt. Jaime’s house had become ... stifling.
It was Scarlett’s fault, naturally. She’d baited the man and then taken off her clothes in front of him. If she’d planted herself in his bed wearing a whipped-cream bikini, she couldn’t have been more shameless.
She’d never really seen the point in shame, but she was paying the price for that now. Over the last few weeks, Jaime had attempted to erect a wall in between them. He’d pulled back from her the smallest bit, but she’d felt the withdrawal sharply—and she’d resented it.
She’d wanted to know if he still wanted her. Now she knew he did.
And what the heck was she going to do about it?
Yeah, Scarlett hadn’t the slightest idea. So it was safer to run away until she’d figured it out. At least in real life, unlike in tournament chess, she didn’t have to seal her next move in an envelope before taking a break for the night.
“This seems a little normie for you,” Scarlett teased as she climbed into Evelyn’s Honda Civic after grabbing a sweater and her purse. The car was black, sure, but otherwise it gave suburban-commuter vibes that didn’t remotely fit with Ev’s neo-goth look.
It was ten o’clock in the morning, and the girl already had on approximately as much smoky eye shadow as Natalie Portman in Black Swan .
“It was Mom’s.”
Yeah, Scarlett could’ve guessed that.
Evelyn drove them along Musgrove’s main street, past the parking lot where she and Jaime had attended the farmers’ market the past three Saturdays. He’d even taken her to Emery’s last book club meeting, which she’d discovered he sometimes attended. The entire thing had been kinda lovely.
But rather than turning into the residential neighborhoods, Evelyn turned toward the country. They drove past several scrubby farms and dozens of electrical poles overgrown with kudzu before arriving at an abandoned switch house near the railroad tracks. It was one of those structures that could’ve been built any time between the end of the Civil War and the 1970s, the kind that littered the back roads of the South.
Predictably, the switch house was covered with graffiti, and something about it—perhaps it was the partially collapsed roof over a window that made the structure look as if it were winking in farewell—made Scarlett sad.
Evelyn parked on a spot where the long grass and weeds covering the yard had been tamped down. She took off her seat belt and twisted to grab a bag from the back seat.
“Are we trespassing?” Scarlett asked, as she followed Ev out of the car. They clambered over the broken-down fence surrounding the building.
“That a problem for you?” Ev’s expression was mischievous.
“Nope.” Scarlett had never been one for following the rules—or at least not the rules that didn’t make sense to her. The rules in chess, those made sense. The game wouldn’t work without them. Weird social systems, though, about who you should talk to and when you could wear white shoes and what you were allowed to do: those were an entirely other thing.
Though maybe Scarlett was beginning to find some respect for ones such as Don’t undress in front of your ex unless you know what the heck you’re hoping to do about it .
But that wasn’t a reasonable thing to ponder in front of Jaime’s baby sister.
“So my thesis is about finding abandoned buildings like this one,” Evelyn explained. “Places that are magnets for tagging.” The plaster walls of the switch house were indeed covered in spray-painted names and initials, sexual comments, and profanity.
“I’m sure there are plenty to choose from around here.”
“Yup. Then I do things like this.” Ev led Scarlett around the house to the side that faced the tracks. There, she had painted a massive mural with a distinctive art deco–social realism vibe. The figures were highly stylized, a diverse mix of men and women, Black and white and Latine and Indigenous people. They were working in fields and mines, caring for children and teaching, voting and working in stores. It was a vision of what life could be here that was rooted in the past but not nostalgic for it. As if Musgrove were peopled exclusively by diverse superheroes.
Looking at the mural, Scarlett wanted to stand up straighter. To be better . That was probably because of the colors, which reflected the landscape. The entire image, actually, seemed as if it belonged here. As if it had grown onto the building rather than being grafted on it.
“Holy crap, Ev,” Scarlett breathed. “You’re like the Diego Rivera of Appalachia.”
But Evelyn, much like her brother, had trouble taking a compliment. “Not really.”
Unfortunately, the graffiti artists who’d covered the rest of the switch house hadn’t left Evelyn’s work alone. Here and there, they’d begun covering Evelyn’s piece with names and cusswords.
Scarlett pointed to a note about the size of someone’s package. “You gonna paint over that?” Surely it would be possible to cover it up and restore the image to how it had looked when Evelyn had finished it.
“Nope. I’m going to document it.” Ev pulled a hulking Nikon and a fancy lens out of her bag.
“Nice camera,” Scarlett said, because it clearly was.
“Thanks. It was a Christmas present from Jaime a few years ago.” She set about photographing the scrawls that were marring her own work of art.
“This doesn’t ... make you mad?” Scarlett asked.
“No way. I don’t own this building any more than they do. I’m trespassing as much as they are. Mine may look more ‘artistic,’ but it’s graffiti too.”
All of this went to show that Scarlett had never understood art. Sometimes, if she had time off at a tournament, she tried to class herself up. She’d been to the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, and the Prado, but underneath it all, she was still a hick who didn’t understand why Thomas Kinkade wasn’t considered quality.
But what really mattered here, she guessed, was that Evelyn was happy. Scarlett didn’t have to understand this project. Ev did, and that was what mattered.
“Can I ask you something?” Scarlett said when Evelyn had finished taking her pictures.
“Of course.”
“Are you okay?”
Scarlett meant—well, she meant a lot of things by the question. But if she spelled them out, it would feel as if she were prying or forcing the girl to reveal things she might not want to reveal. So Scarlett could only load the word okay with as much meaning as possible and then wait for Evelyn to pick out what she wanted to share.
Luckily, Evelyn was smart, and so she went right for the heart of it. “You mean with my daddy in prison?”
“Yeah.” What had happened to the Crofts would’ve broken the average family. A below-average family such as Scarlett’s would have shattered entirely.
Evelyn stowed her camera and considered this. “I’m not glad that it happened, but we’re healthier because it happened.”
“You’re healthier ?” Scarlett echoed stupidly.
Evelyn gave a tight nod. “I spent a lot of time thinking what if , not because I wanted to undo it but because I legitimately wondered what it would’ve been like if he hadn’t been arrested. And unless I could rewind the tape and go back to before it began and convince him not to do it, well, then I guess Jaime, Mom, and I ended up better for it. We all got help. I’ve been in therapy for as long as I can remember. And my mother—I mean, can you imagine her darkening a psychologist’s office without this to process?”
“Nope.”
“If Dad hadn’t been arrested, we would be like some dark domestic HBO drama. We’d all be lying to each other and trying to pretend that we didn’t see what we all clearly saw. It would’ve been deeply fucked up. As it is, we have to talk to each other, and we have to be honest. There’s no hiding and there’s no false pride. I wish it hadn’t happened mostly because I wish he hadn’t hurt people. But for myself, I would choose this over whatever other version of my life I might’ve had.”
Whatever Scarlett had been expecting Evelyn to say, it wasn’t that. The words made a lot of sense, but it wasn’t the outcome that Scarlett or anyone else would’ve predicted when Dr. Croft had been arrested. It would’ve seemed more likely the family would’ve entered the witness protection program and melted away, hoping that nobody ever recognized them or connected them with these events.
But that obviously hadn’t been how Jaime had played it. And she suspected that if Evelyn took her to see more of her murals, Scarlett would find some of them probably commented directly on Evelyn’s dad too.
Jaime and Evelyn Croft were so much braver than Scarlett would’ve been in the same situation.
Though ... maybe they hadn’t processed it in the same way. Scarlett wondered if Jaime—who’d had a very different relationship with his father than his baby sister had—would also see the upside in his father’s arrest.
Jaime had lost an entire version of himself. He’d deferred college, lost friendships, and been humiliated by it in ways that Evelyn hadn’t been. For her, this had been all she’d ever known. Maybe it was easier for her to see the upside in ways Jaime or Mrs. Croft might not be able to.
Carefully but—she hoped—warmly, Scarlett said, “I’m so glad it didn’t ruin your life.” She’d limit her comments here to Evelyn herself rather than including her mother and brother in them.
“I wouldn’t’ve let it.” Evelyn seemed so certain about that, so certain that she was a force of nature, sturdier than the winds that had come rushing toward her seventeen years ago. She’d proved that she was, though, hadn’t she? The entire Croft family had.
Scarlett knew people looked at her and thought she was “strong.” At some level, she probably was. It took discipline to memorize thousands of chess moves and diagrams. To hold it together during high-stakes matches and to fight back after you’d blundered.
But no matter how much Scarlett won, no matter how much she tried to prove she wasn’t the little girl trying to convince another manager not to evict her mother after they hadn’t paid the rent, she didn’t always believe it. She usually didn’t believe it.
Scarlett envied Evelyn’s certainty.
Evelyn began walking back to her car, with Scarlett trailing behind her. When Ev reached it and stowed her bag, she shot Scarlett a look. “Can I ask you something now?”
From the expression on Evelyn’s face, Scarlett was certain she should say no. This—whatever it was—was going to hurt. But after Evelyn’s bald admission, what exactly was Scarlett supposed to do here? Lie?
“Sure.” Scarlett braced herself.
“When I walked into Jaime’s house—well, let’s just say that there are mad scientists’ labs with less chemistry going on in them than there was in his den.”
Yikes. Also . . . true.
“I’m not hearing a question here,” Scarlett said, in order to hedge.
But she had absolutely no problem identifying what Evelyn was asking without asking: Are you sleeping with my brother?
No—but I want to.
Evelyn watched Scarlett steadily for a few beats, and Scarlett worried for a second that she might be as transparent to the little sister as she was to the big brother.
Finally, Evelyn said, “I just hope you’re being more honest with him than you’re being with me.”
That was certainly a negative. “You Crofts, you’re obsessed with honesty.”
“You can understand why.”
Yes, Scarlett could.
An hour later, after some truly excellent barbeque sandwiches, Evelyn dropped Scarlett off at Jaime’s. It was nice that they got to see each other frequently. She wasn’t surprised by how connected Jaime was to the town and to his family, but Scarlett could see the appeal of all that now, in ways she never had as a teenager.
Not ready to face Jaime, Scarlett went to hide in her room. The entire trip had stirred things up in her, like leaves whipping through the breeze in October, so she dug her phone out of her pocket and dialed her mother.
Alma answered on the fourth ring. “Hey, darlin’.”
“Hey ... Mom.” Scarlett didn’t call her mother by her first name, but she’d thought of her that way ever since she’d been eleven because that was when Scarlett had gotten into the habit of filling out all the school paperwork, not to mention all their leases and Alma’s job applications and any official form for the government. People always marveled at how good Scarlett’s handwriting was, and she knew it was because she’d had to learn to write as a passable adult before she’d been in middle school.
“How the hell are you?” her mother asked.
“I’m good.” In an absolute sense, that was true. Scarlett was well fed and well rested. Her bank account was full. She wasn’t in any mortal danger.
She was simply in a whirlwind of emotions, without any break in sight. She had to figure out what to do about the stuff she’d realized about Jaime, and she had to do it in a way that didn’t break either of them. And she didn’t tend to be any good at delicate operations of that sort unless they took place on a chess board.
“You in New York?” Alma asked.
“No, Musgrove.” Scarlett had explained that she would be there for two months, two months that were more than halfway through, but she wasn’t surprised Alma hadn’t remembered.
“How’s that pit?” Her mother didn’t bother to keep the scorn out of her voice.
Every place they left was a pit. It was the Emerald City when they were on the way there, but as soon as that lie had revealed itself to be, you know, a lie, then it would be downgraded to a pit. That was the way of things with Alma.
“It’s more or less the same.” The changes that had happened in town wouldn’t be interesting to her mother, and besides, Scarlett wasn’t certain how to say It feels sadder without sounding as if she were judging—and for once, she really didn’t want to do that.
“And how’s Jaime Croft?” Of course Alma remembered him perfectly well.
Scarlett had always refused to discuss her love life with her mother. One thing that was certainly true of Alma was that she was never without male companionship. She didn’t really do “alone,” which had ironically meant she was well suited to motherhood.
She’d treated Scarlett as an equal from the age of five on up. Maybe before that, even, but Scarlett couldn’t remember before kindergarten. If, sometimes, Scarlett would’ve wanted Alma to wield some authority or to have advice to offer her daughter, well, that was just tough cookies. Scarlett had the kind of mother who’d paint your nails and make you a margarita. She did not have the kind of mother who’d help you study for the SATs—not that Scarlett had ever taken them.
In the years since she’d grown up, Scarlett had taken the measure of the mothers and fathers she’d encountered, and she’d realized that whatever quibbles she might have with Alma’s style, she certainly hadn’t done Scarlett any harm. And that was more than she could say for many of the parents she’d met.
“He’s ... I actually think he’s well.”
Scarlett had spent half her life assuming Jaime and Evelyn were broken. But after spending these weeks with Jaime and after what Evelyn had said today, Scarlett marveled at how they’d come out the other side emotionally grounded and all grown up. That was just bizarre . One of them ought to have become a jerk just for fairness or something.
“Well, whatever people say, I guess the apple does fall away from the tree, because his father—”
“We don’t need to rehash that.” For all that Scarlett didn’t like what Dr. Croft had done, she didn’t feel the need to crow over the man’s fate. It was sad enough on its own.
“Jaime did! I saw his show The Hungry Sun .”
“ Devouring ,” Scarlett corrected, though the idea of the sun chowing down was pretty amusing.
“Whatever. I saw it, and I don’t mind saying that that boy can fill out a pair of jeans. But you always did go for the cute ones.”
These days, Scarlett went for the ones who asked the least of her. The ones who didn’t mind that she didn’t do strings, that she wasn’t looking for a commitment. When she was preparing for a tournament, Scarlett did chess fourteen hours a day: studying diagrams of old games, spending hours playing blitz games at the Marshall Chess Club, then nights on a burner account on CheckMate.com, hoping no one would recognize her style of play.
No, the only men Scarlett could have in her life were those who wouldn’t comment on how, frankly, unhealthy it all was.
That was why she and Jaime could never have a future.
Or at least that was one of the reasons. If he saw how she was when she wasn’t here, he’d say that she was wearing herself thin, that she didn’t sleep enough or walk enough or get enough potassium.
“He’s adapting my book,” she said instead.
“Oh good. Then I’ll finally read it.”
What Alma meant was that she’d finally watch it. She’d started listening to the audiobook when it had come out, but then she’d lost her phone in Daytona, or at least that was what she’d told Scarlett. It might’ve hurt except Scarlett had never expected Alma to even bother.
Long ago, Scarlett had realized that she could either take Alma as she was, or she could spend a lifetime being pissed that she wasn’t someone else. For once, Scarlett had chosen the mature path, and it had saved her a lot of grief.
“I hope you’ll enjoy it.” And Scarlett meant that.
In the background, someone said something about dinner.
“Is that Jaxson?” Scarlett asked.
“No,” Alma replied, “it’s Sean.”
Jaxson was probably long gone—and that was what Scarlett got for not talking to her mother more frequently. It was probably quite a story; stories about Alma’s love life tended to be.
“Just a second, Sean, I have to wrap up talking to Scarlett.” Then, to her daughter she said, “Do you need anything, sweetie?”
That was the thing: if Scarlett had needed something, Alma would’ve tried to get it for her. At least if it were a cute bathing suit cover-up or tickets to an MMA fight or bail money in Atlantic City. Underneath it all, and in the ways she was capable, Alma loved Scarlett. That knowledge had soothed whatever bumps there had been along the way. Her mother truly loved her.
“Nope, I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“It was good to hear from you too! You call me back real soon.”
“I will.”
After she hung up, Scarlett stared out the window at Jaime’s front yard for a long time. The pines were swaying in the breeze, sending patterns of light and shadow over a tooth of bedrock that tore through the earth. Scarlett had read an article in an airplane magazine once about how the Appalachian Mountains were more than a billion years old. Older than the Rockies. Older than the Grand Canyon. So old it made her dizzy to contemplate.
The little dramas and paper cuts that made up Scarlett’s life—what would they look like to something that ancient?
Meaningless, presumably. Everything Scarlett did for good or for ill was a sneeze to the mountains. Less than a sneeze: a heartbeat.
When she’d been young, Scarlett hadn’t worried about trying to do good. She’d only wanted to survive . Later on, when her closet and belly were full, she’d wanted to thrive, including fighting for other people.
To do that, she’d made some dubious choices, hoping the ends justified whatever little harm she might have caused along the way. However, Evelyn’s pronouncement that she was better off now than she would’ve been if her father hadn’t been arrested twisted things around. Specifically, it made Scarlett think that her most suspect choices, the ones that had caused her the most grief, might not have been bad at all.
Which changed everything .
Feeling twitchy, she finally got up and found Jaime. He was still in the den, but he’d pushed his computer to the side and was staring out the window. The view from here was of the back porch and the valley spilling out before them.
“Sorry I didn’t get back sooner.” In truth, Scarlett was sorry about so many things. But this was the best she could offer him.
“No problem.”
“I couldn’t face work today.” I couldn’t face you today.
“You’ve earned a break,” he said without judgment. “And Ev’s right, we’re almost done.”
Very soon, Scarlett would head back to New York. She needed to start preparing for Norway Chess in earnest, especially since she’d be taking another break in order to be on set when Queen’s Kiss filmed. But the last few weeks ... they’d mixed her up about what mattered, about what was real.
“I want to say something.”
Her tone must have given away that it was serious, because Jaime finally turned toward her. He was smiling, but it didn’t touch his eyes.
When he said, “Oh boy,” the joke was forced, not genuine.
“I think sometimes, the last few weeks, you’ve wanted answers from me. About why we broke up. About whether we could’ve made it. Was there some other multiverse in which things didn’t end up the way they did between us.” That was what she’d thought he’d been asking, anyhow.
He just watched her, steadily, patiently. Not contradicting her summary of what they’d talked about sometimes, when they were feeling brave or stupid, or both.
“And maybe I’ve wanted answers too,” she said. “Maybe that’s why I refused to give the rights to Queen’s Kiss to anyone but you. Because I thought if I let you have my book, I could learn how you’ve been. Whether your life had been ... destroyed when your dad went to prison. And today with Evelyn, I finally found the answer I was looking for: no.”
Or at least she hoped he saw things the way Evelyn did.
“You could’ve just asked me that,” Jaime said. “I could’ve told you I wasn’t.”
Thank God. “But I needed to see it. I needed to ... believe it.”
“And you do now?”
“Yup. And so, because I’m confident about that, I think I can finally offer you what you want.”
He seemed to find this possibility amusing. Or intriguing. “And that is?”
“It wasn’t a tragedy that we broke up. It wasn’t because of what happened with your dad. It was just that we were young, and we wanted different things. I loved chess—I do love chess. And playing has given me so many things I never would’ve gotten any other way. I’ve been around the world. Do you really think that would’ve happened for me if I had stayed here and worked at the Waffle House? Honestly, can you imagine me working at a restaurant?” Or even worse, an office—yikes.
“Nope.” His smile was bittersweet.
“ The one who got away is a seductive idea, but it isn’t real. Leaving you made all my dreams possible. And I know now that even if your dad hadn’t been arrested, you wouldn’t have come with me. You would’ve gone to Tech, and you would’ve grown in different ways too.” And you would’ve met women who aren’t as difficult as I am. “And so we still would’ve broken up. We still would’ve ... hurt each other.” It just would’ve been in a different moment and in a different way.
Jaime buried one of his hands in his hair, as if he needed to hold his head into place while she knocked his world off kilter. “You know, staying didn’t ruin my life either. It just changed it. Obviously I didn’t stop writing just because I didn’t go to college right away. I didn’t stop filming stuff. My path was messy, but I still got to make movies in the end. I wish it had been easier sometimes, and I really wish so many people didn’t need to get hurt, but I still got where I wanted to go.”
“Yup. Maybe it’s been comforting over the years for us to dwell on the coulda, shoulda, woulda. But it’s like thinking, on vacation, that you ought to move to the beach. If you really did it, you’d still have to make money somehow, and you’d still have to scrub the floors of your cabana. And you aren’t ever getting away from laundry—it’ll follow you into the grave! No, you don’t want to move to the beach—you want to be on vacation all the time. Pining for the one who got away is actually pining for ...”
In Jaime’s case, it was probably pining for someone . Jaime clearly would do well with a family. He was built for it. He’d be good at being a husband, being a father. He could be the true paragon his father had pretended to be.
In Scarlett’s case, it was probably pining for a time when her life had been simpler. For when she wasn’t an object of fascination for the entire chess world. Or for those days with Jaime before everything had changed and she’d realized her potential and her power.
“... for the past,” she finished weakly. “You’re a pawn, so you can’t go backward. You just have to keep advancing. So that’s my answer, Jaime Croft. Breaking up wasn’t what either of us wanted, but it was our only play.”
Jaime sat with Scarlett’s speech for a long time.
“Thanks,” he finally said. “For telling me that.”
She hoped he felt grateful and that, at some point, when she gave him the rest of the truth, he’d stay grateful. For now, untangling this piece of it—articulating it, reckoning with it—left Scarlett feeling as if she’d just gotten over pneumonia. It was going to take a good long while to get back to fighting weight here.
Scarlett got to her feet. “I think I’m going to take a nap.”
But as she was leaving the room, she thought she heard Jaime say under his breath, “Answers aren’t the only things I want from you.”