16. The Cottage Mirror
THE COTTAGE MIRROR
Sandy and Erica are on the porch, and I can't look away.
Sandy is holding Erica's coffee while Erica fixes her scarf.
The frost sits on the railing. The morning is cold and grey and Sandy is laughing at something Erica said, and Erica is looking up at with an expression full of love.
Sandy's hand rests on Erica's hip. They look picture perfect together.
Ana is taking photos of them for social media.
They aren’t even together. It’s an arrangement—the label’s idea, a fake romance to bury Sandy’s scandal under something wholesome, and I’m the one who helped set it up. Even their lie is more honest than the truth I’ve got with Lena.
I want that with Lena. I want to hold her coffee and fix her scarf. I want to be visible with her.
I go up to my room and lock the door. I pick up my bass and sit on the bed and play the low notes—the ones that vibrate through the wood and into my ribs. I play for twenty minutes without looking at my phone, without monitoring the time, without worrying about who might hear.
The room fills with sound. The thought arrives during the sustain, hanging in the air with the resonance of something true that I can't unsay:
I’ve hidden Lena like a dirty secret, and pretended I was protecting her.
I set the bass down. I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling for an hour. I think about the moment I asked Lena to be private. I said it was about protecting our privacy. But I was protecting myself.
And now Lena is looking at me and seeing exactly what I've done to her.
The next morning I get up and go to the kitchen. Everyone else is asleep. I make coffee and watch the frost melt on the porch railing. Sandy and Erica will be up soon. They'll probably hold hands while they drink coffee.
I want to be with Lena.
That evening—the first evening we’ve had power since the storm knocked it out for two days—we celebrate the finished track with too much wine. The room is full of aftermath: cables coiled on the floor, and snacks everywhere.
I’m on the floor with a glass of red, when Jo clears her throat.
“So. The publicist called. The scandal isn’t dying fast enough for them.” She looks at Sandy. “They want you to prove you can commit to a person. They want you to fake-date someone.”
“That’s so 2010,” I say.
“What the hell?” Sandy mutters.
“Who, though?” Rebecca says, scanning the room. “A volunteer. Anyone.”
“Hard pass,” Ana says. “I’d murder her inside a week.”
The joke goes round the circle, and of course it lands on me. “What about Rhonda,” Sandy says. “Rhonda’s single, Rhonda’s stable, Rhonda would fake-date a lamppost if the band asked nicely—”
“I’m already seeing someone,” I say.
The room erupts. What? Since when? Who?
“I’ll tell you all later,” I say, waving them off. “We’re not talking about me. Focus.” But it’s out now, and it’s real, and saying it in a warm room full of my people is the first brick I’ve pulled out of the wall. Jo, from the corner, raises her glass. “Good for you.”
“Or,” Jo says then, slow, her eyes drifting to Erica hunched over her laptop pretending not to listen, “you ask someone who’s already here.”
Erica’s fingers still on the keys. “Don’t,” she says. Which, in my experience, is exactly how these things start.
Ana and Jeremy start talking about production stuff. Sandy eventually gives up interrogating me and moves on to telling a story about a disastrous interview she did last month. Her voice gets louder with each retelling, more animated. By the third sentence, the whole band is laughing.
I watch them. I watch the ease of it. The way Jeremy leans back in his chair like he doesn't have to guard his body. The way Jo sits on the couch with her arm around Rebecca's waist.
I pull out my phone and text Lena: So I told the band I'm seeing someone.
The three dots appear immediately. She was waiting by her phone.
Me too. I already told my friends.
Jo sends me a video of a singer-songwriter whose audience laps over ours.
What do you think? It’s totally different but I think doing a duet with them will be valuable.
I stare at the text.
I think yes. I send back a venue shortlist and a rough route for a launch tour.
Perfect. I’ll reach out to the artist, you take care of the route.
Ana finds me on the porch an hour later. I'm sitting with my phone and my bass and the frost and the quiet. She's holding two mugs of tea. She hands me one without asking if I want it. The mug is nice and warm.
We drink tea in the frost.
“So,” Ana says, not looking at me. “This person you’re seeing. The one you won’t talk about.”
“I’m not talking about her.”
“I know. I’m just saying—whoever they are,” She sips her tea. “I can’t wait to meet them. Whenever you’re ready. No rush.”
“Soon,” I say, and I’m surprised to find I mean it. “I think—soon.”
She sits down next to me. We drink tea in the frost.
"I’m really excited to get off this mountain," I say.
"Yeah?"
Ana reaches over and squeezes my shoulder once.
Later in my room, I call Lena. She answers on the second ring. She was waiting.
"Hi," she says, breathless.
"Guess what?”
“What?”
“I told the band about us."
"Really? Wow, that's great."
"But I'm—" I pause. The words are right here. "I miss you alot. I've missed you every second since I got in the van last week. I miss your apartment and your coffee and the way you type so loudly in the kitchen."
"I don’t type that loud."
"I miss your hands."
Silence.
"I miss your hands," I say again. "Your hands on me. Your hands reaching for my face in the dark."
“Tell me more,” she says, and her voice has changed—lower, right up against the phone.
“I miss your hands.” I shut my eyes in the dark of the car. “I miss what they do. I miss the way you never rush.”
“Where are you?”
“In my room. Everyone’s asleep.”
A pause, and then, soft and certain: “Tell me what you’d do. If I were there.”
So I do. Quiet, into the phone, frost blooming across the windows and the cottage dark behind me, I tell her—slow and specific, the way she taught me words matter—and she gives it back, her breath catching in the way that undoes me, telling me where her hands are and what she wishes they were doing, until the distance stops being distance and turns into just the dark and her voice and the two of us coming apart across three hundred kilometres of nothing.
When it breaks for her I hear my name in it.
When it breaks for me she stays on the line and says “I love you,” gentle, like she’s reached through the phone to hold the back of my neck.
After, we lie in our separate dark and breathe.
"I made the pasta," she says. "The one you like."
"Which pasta?"
"The one with the cream and the garlic and the—"
"Oh. The one you burned the first time you tried it."
"The one I burned the first time, yes. I got it right this time."
"I want to eat that with you."
"Then come home."
“I can’t. Not tonight.” And it pains me to say it. “The record isn’t finished, the band needs me up here, and there’s one van and five people—I can’t strand them on a mountain because I finally grew a heart. But Lena—”
“I know,” she says. “I know. I wasn’t really asking. I just wanted to hear that you want to.”
“I want to more than I’ve wanted anything.
” I sit up in the dark. “So here’s what I’m going to do instead.
I’m going to finish this record. And then I’m coming home, and I’m going to do this properly—in the open, in front of whoever’s in the room, no more separate entrances, because I am done being careful about the wrong things. ”
“Rhonda.” Her breath catches.
“I mean it. No more separate entrances. No more room with no windows. Just—wait for me. Two weeks. And then I’m going to make you the least invisible woman in any room I’m ever in.”
The line goes quiet, and then she laughs, wet and disbelieving. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. Two weeks. I’ll keep the pasta.”
We stay on the line until she falls asleep, her breathing slow in my ear, and I lie in the dark of a cottage in the woods and, for the first time in a year, I don’t feel like I’m hiding. I feel like I’m getting ready.