Chapter 74
— Chapter 74 —
Aubrey and I pack up the things we want to keep. Mostly books. Some art supplies. A photo album of the pictures we took with my Instamatic. The art we can’t bear to sell.
I take the boxes to Bee’s condo. She’s letting us store them in her garage so they don’t get lost in the shuffle if our house sells while we’re gone. Hans is over when I get there.
“I was just… dropping something by,” he says when he joins us in the garage. He’s wearing regular Hans clothes, but his hair is disheveled, and under his sweater vest, his shirt is wrinkled.
Bee snort-laughs. “Is that what we’re calling it?”
“Oh, well,” Hans says, blushing. “I was attempting to give you plausible deniability, but I suppose you tell Freya everything anyway.”
“I have no interest in denying you ,” Bee says, her cheeks turning pink.
Hans leans over and kisses her temple. “Good.”
We unload my car, stacking boxes and bags neatly on the shelves in the garage, but Bee brings all the paintings and carvings inside. “I’m going to live in my own private art gallery until you come to claim these,” she tells me. “I’m hoping it will help me miss you a little less.” She laughs, eyes teary. “Probably won’t. Maybe it will help me miss you better.”
The last time I left, I felt like everything that was here for me was over anyway. This time, I feel like I am tethered to Somers by a handful of rubber bands wrapped around my heart.
I give Bee Step’s notebook and the boxes of paperwork I found in the basement.
“Ooh! Thank you,” she says, flipping to Step’s page of street names. “Once you and Aubrey are all the way out in the woods, I’m going to start knocking on doors and kicking in walls.”
Hans’s face flashes with momentary panic, but then he laughs. “Figuratively.”
Bee scrunches her nose and grins at me. “Sure.”
Hans makes an excuse about having a meeting, although I think he’s just giving me and Bee some time together. But as soon as he walks out the door, I realize I’m not sure if I’ll see him again before we leave. I run out to the driveway.
“Hans!” I call.
He turns around.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” I say, hugging him hard, surprising us both.
He hugs me back. Pats my shoulder. “You don’t ever have to,” he says.
I pull away. Wipe tears on my sleeve.
Hans’s eyes are a little teary too. “It has been my pleasure, Freya… of the Fólkvangr.”
I laugh. “I’m going to miss you, Hans Gruber,” I say, and he laughs too.
“I can’t believe you’re really leaving,” Bee says while we’re bundled in throw blankets drinking coffee in her hammock. “It’s awesome and I know you and Aubrey can do this. But when we were kids, I never once looked at you and thought, ‘I bet someday that girl is going to walk two thousand miles through the woods.’?”
“What did you think I was going to do?” I ask.
“I don’t think I ever knew what you wanted,” Bee says, kicking her foot against the patio to keep us moving. “I knew you liked art and nature and cats and books. But I don’t think I had any sense of what kind of life you were hoping for.”
“I didn’t either.” I look up at the gray sky, trying to figure out where the sun should be. “I was always just trying to get by.”
“What do you want now?”
“Well, I’m kind of busy for the next six months…”
Bee shoves my shoulder. “After that. Like, don’t be practical. What do you want. First thing that comes to mind! DO IT! ”
“Have a little shop?” I say, and it surprises me, because it’s not something I knew I was thinking about. Then suddenly there’s a picture forming in my mind. I know what my shop looks like, how it feels to be there. “Maybe in Maine. I’ll sell old books and refinish furniture, have a few café tables and an espresso machine. We’ll sell rock candy, saltwater taffy, bookmarks, postcards. And I’ll go to the ocean and walk on the beach every morning. I always said I would and then I didn’t. But I will this time.”
“Can I visit?” she asks.
“Of course,” I say, touched that she’s already pretending this dream is real. “We live upstairs. You can stay in Aubrey’s room when she and Shray backpack through Europe.”
Bee grins. “Perfect.”
On my drive home, I let my mind wander back to my shop. I am sitting behind the counter I’ve made from an old mahogany bar, late day sun barely making it through the store, but it’s enough to keep me from turning the lights on for a little while longer. I have a tall stack of books in front me, and I keep a flat carpenter’s pencil behind my ear, because I use it to write prices on the blank page at the front of each book: ~.50, ~$1.00, ~$2.50 if one of them seems really special. I’ll read the books that look interesting before I send them out to the shelves. Keep the ones I love the most.
Upstairs, Aubrey’s room will have a four-poster bed we’ll find at a flea market, and we’ll carve the story of our trek into the old maple wood. I’ll paint her ceiling midnight blue, string lights from the bedposts to look like stars, and I’ll coddle her like a little kid whenever she’ll let me. We’ll bake cookies at midnight and splash paint on drop cloths. She can drive down to visit Shray at RISD on weekends. Maybe in a year or so she’ll decide to go to school there too, and I’ll road-trip to Rhode Island to take her out to dinner and stock her mini fridge with snacks. But her room over the shop will always be there, exactly as she left it last.
No one will yell in our home. No doors will slam. We won’t drink. We aren’t going to start smoking again. And sometimes when the weather is clear and warm in spring before the tourists roll into town, we will flip the sign on the door to say Sorry, we’re closed and spend the day in the woods hanging out with pine trees.