Chapter Twenty-Two
Liam,
Starting a text like a letter feels odd, but since you haven’t responded to my calls or messages for weeks, a bit of formality seems warranted. I know you don’t want to speak to me right now, and I understand why, but I just have to get this off my chest.
I know what you’ve been through this past year, and I am so sorry for being dishonest with you. I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I care about you so much, and I would give anything to go back in time and tell you the truth from the very beginning
No matter what happens, I hope you’re happy, Liam Miller. I hope you watch a sunset every once in a while and think of me. I think about you every day, and I miss you.
Lucy x
*
July flies by.
My schedule beings to settle into something resembling normalcy, helped by the slower pace of summer in the publishing world, which all but dozes off this time of year. Instead of burning the midnight oil until a hungry stomach forces me to stop, I can leave the office at a decent hour. Elle and I even make the most of summer hours, embracing the season’s rare leniency with a sense of well-earned freedom.
Anne was right, and Ruby doesn’t make the decision to terminate her contract, which Anne says our contracts department would never allow her to do. She claims she’ll spend a month brainstorming a new series, and we’ll reevaluate at the end of the summer.
Meanwhile, I spend any moment I’m not working, eating, or sleeping, writing.
And I don’t tell Anne about it.
I barely touch my Instagram, because although I’m writing a romance novel, I can’t seem to face the fact that I’m no longer living in one. A few followers even message me, asking if I’d ever tell them the secret project I was working on. I don’t answer because I don’t really have an answer.
Writing is not an easy process. And any Tom, Dick, or Harry who says they can “probably write a book” can go to hell. They can’t. And anyone who has written one deserves a medal. Deleting all the extraneous uses of the word “just” from a document should be deserving enough of a reward.
What makes the process even more difficult is the fact that even though these characters aren’t based on my people—the real people of Hudson Hollow— and even though it’s not exactly my story, it certainly feels like it. I’ve changed the characters’ motivations and personalities significantly, especially the hero and heroine, but the experiences they have together, they all lead back to Liam for me.
Instead of a mountain top, I make the hero’s “Spider-Man spot” an inlet behind his house. It’s a piece of land that juts out into the lake, with a long, winding path that leads to a small clearing with a pebbly beach. I wrote about it one night after Elle had fallen asleep and I was sitting in bed, in the dark with my laptop on my lap. I didn’t realize I was crying until I wrote the last line of the chapter and a tear dropped on my keyboard.
Love scenes are the hardest. I can build tension between the couple, but when I try to get them together, I draw a blank. My fingers are incapable of moving across the keys. It’s not that I don’t know how to write about two people falling in love or depict them being intimate with one another. It’s that every time I try to write about the hero tracing his knuckle along her collarbone or placing his large hand around her ribcage and pressing her against a wall , all I see is Liam.
I see him leaning over me, his elbow on the top of his Jeep, looking down at me, his blonde hair blocking his eyes. I remember myself longing to touch my lips to his, just to see what he tasted like, to close the distance between us that felt like magnets at different poles.
I remember him reaching over and rubbing his thumb in circles on my knee while he drove me home from Nora’s party. I remember memorizing the rhythm of his fingers, matching my breaths with his circles to keep the nausea at bay.
I remember kissing him.
I remember his mouth covering mine so gently, that it barely even touched me. If I close my eyes, I can feel his tongue tracing the outline of my lips before he moved it in tandem with mine. I can feel the pressure of his hands against my hips, pressing me into the side of the house.
I can feel him.
I try not to write those scenes before bed anymore, because if I do, I don’t sleep. I toss and turn to the memory of him. I writhe in the guilt, the shame of manipulating his feelings, and the ache of missing him.
But still, I write.
Because if I don’t, what will it all have been for?
By the second week of August, I’m at fifty thousand words when my word tracker app expected me to be at thirty thousand. By then, Elle is also so sick of me refusing her invitations to go out on the weekends that she is ready to throw me out of the window just to get me out of the apartment.
But all the personal drama I impress upon myself with my writing dream and pining over Liam is nothing compared to the battle Josie has gone through. Stage Four pancreatic cancer can go fly a kite.
I rent a car and drive home every weekend. That is, in addition to the days that my mom and Josie spend at doctor’s offices in the city, or nights they stay at our apartment, when Elle and I get to sleep on the pull-out couch together like Joey and Chandler. By the end of July, we had a pretty good picture of how impossible her battle is. By August, she convinced us all that the only one who can decide to fight is her. And she is tired.
She tells me one weekend at the beginning of August, when we’re sitting on the deck at my parents’ house. My laptop is wedged on my thighs in a lounge chair, and Josie is sprawled out next to me in an over-the-top yellow cover-up with a wicker visor and sunglasses that are two sizes too big for her slowly sinking face. The sun is high in the sky, beating down on us like the world’s most powerful heat lamp. “Do you want some lemonade, Jo?” It’s so hot out here, it won’t take long for either of us to get dehydrated.
“Lucille,” she groans, not turning her head to look at me. “Please stop hovering over me like I could just evaporate into dust at any moment.”
“Okay, rude, Sassy Pants,” I say, flicking her arm. She gasps at me.
“You can’t flick me. I’m dying!” she says, wagging a pointed finger at me.
I throw my hands up in the air. “You’re dying but I’m not allowed to offer you lemonade? Double standards,” I grunt. Finally, she sits up, reaching a hand for me to pull her up from a prone position. “What’s the matter? Do you want to go in?” I ask, concerned by how clammy her skin is.
She flicks me.
“Jo!” I whine.
“What I want, my love,” she starts, taking a breath after every few words, “is for you to stop treating me like I’m a glass vase on the edge of a counter.” She reaches her hands out and places them on either side of my face. Her fingers feel more wrinkled, but still soft in signature Josie fashion.
“Well, that is a very silly analogy,” I reply. “I would just move the vase off the edge of the counter. I only wish I could do that with you.”
She sighs. I take hold of each of her wrists, and squeeze them, wishing I could hold on to her, hold her still, keep her here, in one place, just a moment longer. It’s the same wish I’ve had my entire life—when holidays were cut too short, birthdays spent over video calls, moments of happiness with a bitter taste of the knowledge they would end in goodbye. But this goodbye will hurt the most of all. And we both know it.
“Lucy, you know I can’t keep this up,” she says, her hands sliding to my neck. I inhale sharply, but my breath stops short like the air can’t physically get past the sob in my throat. “I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t have it in me.”
“I don’t think you tried hard enough,” I whisper, feeling a crack in my voice.
“You’re right. Because I knew I wasn’t going to win.” She brushes some strands of hair out of my face, cupping her fingers under my chin. “I would rather spend my last few months just like this, in these special moments with you, than in a hospital. You know I have to do things my way.” I know , I say in my head. And in true Josie fashion, she’s choosing to act like dying is her idea. I’m going to die, but not because cancer told me to . Classic.
“Well, then you should have made this decision sooner. We could have been living our best small town lives sewing shit and growing shit and—” I stop talking when Josie wipes a tear off my cheek.
“We have been living our best lives, honey,” she says with a laugh. “Every moment out in the sun. If I squint, I can pretend I’m on the coast of Nice instead of the depths of suburbia.” I let out a laugh, my nose stuffing with the water building in my eyes. “And you are going to continue to do so. You’re going to finish this book. Not for your boss or for me or to prove to your parents or society that you can. You’re going to do it for you.” She takes a breath, wrapping her arms around me. “I’m so proud of you, my Lucy Loo.”
Three weeks later, Josie is gone.
She does it dramatically and on her terms. She lays out in the sun, a smutty book in her hand, and closes her eyes. Part of me wishes she had better planning skills, because she would be the perfect person to have a living memorial for. She would have gotten a kick out of it. Instead, we go all out for her. After the funeral, we drink Bloody Marys and play the music too loudly. Any passerby might have thought we were having a pool party, but we were simply partying on the coast of France, just like Josie would have wished it. I cry more that day than I ever have in my life, knowing that Josie would be shaking her head at me the entire time. What’s the cry about? She would say. I’m in Heaven. The digs here are great.
I have a hard time getting back to work. Elle comes to my parents’ house to physically bring me back to the city. Because if I go back, then that means life has to return to normal. And my life can’t be normal without one of my favorite people in it. I can’t watch millions of people walk by me on the streets of New York, acting as if the entire world hasn’t just shifted on its axis when Josie’s soul left this plane. How could anything be normal anymore?
And yet I go. I go through the motions of everyday life, trying to convince myself that tomorrow will be better. And every night, I go to the roof of our building and watch the sunset, earlier and earlier with each passing day. I watch the sky change from blue to yellow, to orange, sometimes to purple and pink, and I think of a boy, hundreds of miles away, who might just be watching the same thing. And I think of my aunt, wondering if she can see the sunset where she is.
Josie lived her life to the fullest, and she loved how cliché that sounded. She loved to be the topic of conversation, especially disapproving conversation, in which people would scandalize her for chasing her dreams, working too much, spending too much money, smoking too much, and drinking even more. She said everyone was jealous of her. And she was right. We were.
With every day that passes without her, I become more jealous of my aunt’s ability to decide for herself—what she wanted, what she did, where she lived. I’m jealous of her ability not to give a flying fuck what anyone said about it.
I’m jealous because I can’t do the same.