Chapter 6 #2
“Not me.” The only sign of how hard this is for Harper is that her ears have turned red. “I’m the type of person who sticks their knife into the pumpkin and ends up knifing their own arm.”
We laugh, and for a while we talk about everything under the sun.
About Will’s terrible pumpkin, which is indeed next to the bell tower already.
About Knox’s studies. About my time at Brown.
Wyatt’s name hovers in the air, a taut band ready to snap because we all know that’s the reason I left, and we are just waiting for his name to come up.
I mean, he’s already here, unstated, in between every syllable I expend regarding my studies and Rhode Island.
But no one mentions him. No one says things like, “It’s sooo sad” or “You were sooo cute together,” because every one of us knows that words like that are like lashes, and lashes hurt.
We talk and talk and talk, and the radio’s playing a song by One Direction.
I love that Harper has bits of pumpkin on her jeans and is laughing anyway.
She’s laughing at the face Paisley’s carved because Paisley can’t carve, and when I say that, I mean she really can’t carve; everything’s just caved in on itself, and all that’s left of the face is a big, slimy hole.
As we’re putting our mutant pumpkins out on the porch, William’s pickup comes down the street.
He parks on the other side of the road, opens the door for Mom, and offers her his arm.
The sky is darkening, and the light from the streetlamps lights up their tired faces.
Nevertheless, she puts on a smile when she sees us, and all I can think is how strong my mom is.
“I like the first one,” she says and, deeply impressed, points at Paisley’s ugly jack-o’-lantern. “That there is art.”
“That there’s just a mess,” Harper says.
Knox puts his arm around Paisley and pulls her close. “My girlfriend. She’s multi-talented.”
“Speaking of art,” William says as we make our way inside, closing the door behind himself and helping Mom out of her jacket. “Have you all seen my jack-o’-lantern? It’s next to the bell tower.”
Harper and I exchange a glance. Paisley pretends to scratch a spot on her pants.
Only Knox nods thoughtfully. “Never seen anything better, Will. Never seen anything better.”
Will looks happy as a clam.
“Okay, people,” I clap. “We gonna play Monopoly?”
“But this year I’m the dog,” Knox says as we sit down on the sofa.
Paisley pushes away his hand as he reaches for hers. “I want to be the dog!”
“No way.” He puts his arm around her and moves to grab the figure. “I’ve never been the dog. Wyatt always was, and now it’s the first game night without him, and I can—oh.” His eyes dart over to me. “Sorry, A.”
I swallow. “No problem.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mom cast me a worried glance while William busily arranges a group of pillows behind her head.
Couldn’t “Weird guy goes weirder in Aspen” have burned Monopoly instead?
Knox purses his lips and puts the piece back in the box. “Fine. No one gets to be the dog. Give me the hat, Harper.”
Will bends over the table. “I’m the wheelbarrow!”
Harp hands it to him. “That fits you, Will, really.”
“Why?”
“It just does,” I say. “If you weren’t a person, you’d be a wheelbarrow.”
Paisley hands out the money. “I think so, too. Why are there smileys on some of the bills, Aria?”
My eyes rush to the piece of paper in her hand. Wyatt drew all those smileys on the bills because he was always convinced that Knox and I were stealing from him.
Knox and I look at each other. His expression is sympathetic. Mine is doubtful.
“No idea.”
Knox doesn’t correct me. Maybe he’ll tell her later, but right now he doesn’t want his best friend to become a topic. And I’m thankful to him for that. “So, we want to play or what?”
Monopoly was always a thing between us. Every year we’d swear never to play again, and every year we’d do it anyway.
Then it’d get loud, and everyone would compete for the streets, train stations, and hotels as if it was the last thing we had left to do to be happy.
And suddenly we didn’t recognize one another anymore and were happy to see someone else land in jail and would lose our shit when we didn’t win the pot of gold.
And that’s exactly how it goes today, too. After two hours of battling it out, William’s thrown his tie into the fire, Harp has bitten off two fingernails, my hair’s on end, Knox’s face is a deep red, and Paisley looks positively distraught. Mom’s asleep.
We decide to call it quits, afraid that on this rainy October night something really bad could happen.
Really, right when Knox was about to win, Will’s and my glances made it clear that we were planning to make him disappear in the Aspen Highlands.
It was Paisley’s idea to stop. I think she was getting scared.
She’s still got to get used to how we do things here in Aspen.
I hear William lean over my mom and ask her quietly whether she needs anything. His voice sounds strange. Different. Warm and soft somehow. I don’t know this side of him, and, to be honest, it’s a bit weird. Mom grumbles something, which must be a “no,” for shortly thereafter Will says goodbye.
“I’ve got to go to bed. My acid-base balance, you know?” At the door he turns to Knox. “Do me a favor and have another look at my pumpkin, would you? I’ve got a hunch he isn’t feeling too well.”
“It’s a pumpkin,” Paisley says.
Will looks confused. “I know. Why are you telling me that?”
“Well, I mean, pumpkins can’t feel, and, umm…” The look on Will’s face makes her uncomfortable. His eyelid begins to twitch—a bad sign, a really bad sign. Paisley sighs. “Doesn’t matter. Goodnight, Will.”
“We’ll go see him on our way back home,” Knox says.
Only then does Will seem happy, and he leaves.
Harper slips into her cashmere coat. “I’ve got to get going, too. Tomorrow’s training is earlier than usual.”
Paisley sighs frustratedly. “Getting ready for championships. The time of year Polina becomes a tyrant.”
Knox gets up, too, and grabs his car keys off the dining table. “And I’ve got exams. So, see you later, A.” He pats me on the back and ruffles my hair. “It’s cool that you’re back.”
I say goodbye to everyone with a smile, close the door, and lean back against the wood. My smile dies. For a while all I do is stare at the floor and lose myself in the notches until my mother’s voice tears me out of my trance.
“Come here, Aria.”
I look up. Mom rolls to the side to make room on the squeaky old sofa, patting her hand on the space next to Hershey, our gray cat. Everything is quiet except for the crackling of the fire.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“I was.” She holds up the wool blanket. I slip in next to her, snuggle my head up against her chest, and enjoy the way she smells, which has always reminded me of maple syrup. Hershey stretches out, moves his heavy body, and curls up on my stomach.
Mom kisses the top of my head. “But you woke me up.”
“I was quiet.”
“Your thoughts were screaming through the house.”
I sigh. “Was it that obvious?”
“Since that thing with the smileys, yeah.”
“What should I do, Mom? I can’t cope. He’s everywhere.”
She starts kneading my back. It’s something she used to do when I was little that helped chase off all the dark clouds.
“Of course he’s everywhere. We live in a small town, and he’s filling up all your heart.”
“But I don’t want it to be like that.”
“Yes, you do, dear. You do. You just don’t want to want it.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Oh, no. Not in the least.”
Although the fire’s going strong and I’m beneath the wool blanket, a cold shiver shoots through me.
Mom begins to move her fingers up and down the baby hair on my neck. “If you want him to disappear, then you have to leave him behind.”
“I was gone for two years. Two years. I left Wyatt behind a long time ago.”
My mother laughs. Her breath brushes my forehead.
“You weren’t ever really gone. Physically, maybe.
But not with your heart. It’s just as stuck on that Portuguese hockey player with the cute gap in his teeth as it was back when you were in eighth grade and he sent you those singing trolls for Valentine’s Day. ”
“They were love elves.”
Well, in truth, it was the custodian and those two cafeteria ladies who smoked two packs of Camel Lights out behind the dumpsters every day and had voices like sandpaper. But it was cute all the same.
“Exactly. That was the day the boy won your heart. And he’s still got it. If you want it back, grab your Bic and draw a line.”
“I did!”
Mom snorts. “In pencil.”
“Oh, come on.” I kick the blanket off and stand up. Hershey protests by arching his back and disappearing. “You’re starting to piss me off.”
My mother raises an eyebrow. “Because I’m telling you what you already know?”
“No. Because you… Because…”
Her brow makes it all the way to her hairline. “Because I’m right and you don’t want to admit it?”
Heat shoots up my neck. “No. Because you’re making me think of him when I want to forget!”
“You think about him every second; it doesn’t matter what anyone else is talking about.
Whenever I ask you if you’ve gone shopping already and you say, Yeah, your thoughts are Wyatt, Wyatt, Wyatt.
Whenever I ask you if the guestrooms are ready and you say, Yeah, your thoughts are Wyatt, Wyatt, Wyatt. Whenever I ask you…”
“Enough already! Give it a rest, Mom! Just stop. I know all that. I… I just don’t want to hear it, okay?”
Mom sits up, her face tensing in pain. But a few seconds later she is looking at me with compassion. “Don’t you think it’s something you should hear, sweetheart? Don’t you think it’s something you should confront?”
I ball my hands into fists, dig my nails into my palms, and grit my teeth. My heart begins to race. Wyatt was always good at that. Making my heart race, I mean.
“I should confront the fact that I need to prepare the guests’ breakfast. I’ve got to tell Patricia that we need some pumpkin bread and get everything ready for the first reservations, too.”
Mom’s shoulders sink. It looks like the topic’s not yet closed for her, but then her lips form a tired smile. “Okay, Aria. You still aren’t ready.”
No. I’m not. I can’t even think of his name without breaking out in goose bumps.
I can’t think of anything to do with him, not that long scar on his hand from the wild coyote bite, not his faded baseball hats, or the feeling of his wide shoulders pressing against me.
Shit, I can’t even drive by his house on the way to Target.
I make a fifteen-minute detour instead and take the unlit backways to the left, past Buttermilk Mountain, left, left, left, because taking a right always means Wyatt.
I really should be over it already, but I’m not, and that just eats me alive every day, and, yeah, the thought that I haven’t managed to do a damn thing without him in two years and that my heart is still so hung up on him scares the shit out of me.
I mean, what about in another ten, twenty, or thirty years?
What if my heart stays hung up on him forever and can no longer figure out how to get back home?