Chapter 21
·····
After a few hours, I begin to feel like myself again.
The world stops cutting in and out like a poorly edited movie and just.
.. is. We’re sitting on the bed, propped up on like a dozen fluffy hotel pillows, my head resting against Hollis’s shoulder.
He turns on the TV and pushes the button for the guide.
“What do you want to watch?” he asks.
“Don’t care,” I mumble into his shirt. It comes out croaky and congested, like I’m a toad with severe seasonal allergies.
“Oh, here we go,” he says. “ The Blues Brothers . This is the movie you were joking about with Mike, right?”
Wow. Mike and the airport feels like a distant memory, but it was only four days ago. Four days is how long I’ve been traveling with Hollis. Four days is how long Elsie has been dead. How can so much change in less than a standard workweek?
I try to pay attention to Jake and Elwood Blues with their filthy mouths and bad attitudes.
Hollis chuckles at a few lines, and the eye that’s closest to me—the blue-gray one—sparkles in response to the gratuitous car chases.
I would usually be thrilled that he’s enjoying it, but it’s a challenge to feel anything right now without it leading back into the deep, dark grief that left me sobbing against Hollis’s chest again after my bath.
Instead of risking a repeat performance, I force myself to focus on Hollis’s fingers, the way they brush up and down my arm with just enough pressure for me to feel his touch through the thick terry cloth of my robe.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“For what?”
“Being such a mess.”
He moves so his lips rest against my head. It feels like little kisses along my hairline as his mouth moves with his words. “You’re allowed to be a mess. You’re grieving.”
“There’s no reason for me to be this upset. I didn’t even know her. Not really.”
“You can definitely grieve someone you don’t know,” Hollis says. “But I don’t think you’re grieving Elsie.”
“I’m... not?”
“No. I mean, maybe a little. But that’s not what has you this upset.”
“What is it then?”
“I think you’re grieving Mrs. Nash,” he says.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I protest. “She died over two months ago.”
“Yeah. And what did you do when it happened?”
“Well, when she wouldn’t wake up, I called 9-1-1—”
“No, I don’t mean immediately. What I’m asking is did you ever take the time to properly mourn her? All the things you lost?”
“She was really old,” I say. “It was her time, and I know she wasn’t afraid—”
“It doesn’t matter if it was somewhat expected or if it was a freak accident.
You were so close with her.” In response to my blank stare, he continues, “Millicent, you broke up with your long-term boyfriend, moved out of your shared apartment, lost your best friend, and had to find another new place to live all in the course of like six months. That’s a lot for anyone to deal with.
A lot of loss and change. And did you? Did you actually process it? ”
Unless carrying around Mrs. Nash’s ashes while doggedly tracking down the woman she loved to reassure myself that wanting someone to want me back for the rest of my life isn’t pointless counts, then, no. No, I did not.
“It’s okay,” he says when I still don’t respond aloud.
“I’m not criticizing. As far as coping strategies go, occupying yourself with all this was one of the better options.
When my mom died and then Vanessa...”—he waves his hands in a gesture that I guess is supposed to represent completely destroyed me in her quest for revenge —“I tried to avoid feeling anything by drinking too much and being a dick to everyone.”
“You’re still a dick to everyone,” I say with as much of a smile as my tired face can manage.
“What can I say? I found it suited me. A lot more than the drinking, anyway. You probably won’t believe this, but I’m an extremely affectionate drunk.”
My skull feels like it’s filled with concrete that’s starting to dry as I lift it from Hollis’s shoulder to get a look at his face. “You are not,” I say. “There’s no way.”
“It’s true. Tequila in particular makes me absurdly insistent on group hugs. Friends, enemies, acquaintances, strangers. Anyone and everyone who’s around must join in.”
“That must have been difficult. All that hard work keeping people away with your gruff personality undone by your enjoyment of a good mass squeeze.”
“A mass squeeze,” he repeats with the smallest of smiles. “That’s a Millicentism if I ever heard one.”
I stretch my arms around Hollis’s neck and rub myself against his jaw like a cat needing attention. He wraps me in a tight embrace. “I’m only one person,” I say against his throat. “But is this doing it for you?”
“Needs more arms.”
“Sorry I’m not an octopus,” I say.
His breath ruffles the hair near my temple as he sighs. “Nobody’s perfect.”
I shuffle onto his lap, wrapping my legs around him too. “Is this any better?”
“I don’t have any complaints.”
We remain like this for a while, me clinging to his front as if I want to be absorbed into him and Hollis holding me tight like he might not mind that so much.
“If I haven’t said it yet, thank you for taking care of me during my embarrassing public breakdown.”
“Anytime,” he says.
Hollis’s chest rises and falls against mine.
His pulse beats against my ear. This is a hundred thousand intimacies, so many more than I’ve ever experienced before—with Hollis or with anyone.
It doesn’t feel like too many. It doesn’t feel like not enough.
It feels like exactly the right amount for this moment.
“What happens next?” I ask.
“Probably food soon. You’ve barely eaten today.”
On cue, my stomach rumbles long and loud like an oncoming avalanche.
“I gave Rhoda your phone number to pass along to Elsie’s next of kin,” he says, acknowledging what he knows I was really asking. “I told her we’d be in town for a day or two. Figured maybe we can at least meet with someone who knew Elsie, get some answers for you that way.”
“Thank you. Thanks for thinking of that. For doing that.”
I expect him to try to explain it away as another selfish action, but he doesn’t say anything except “You’re welcome.”
Like is not love , my brain reminds me. But all of this has been an awful lot to do for someone he only really likes.
“Hollis,” I whisper, tilting my face so I can see his eyes. They’re back on the TV, boyishly enthralled by another car-chase scene.
“Hmm?”
“Why are you here?”
He shifts his arms so they’re lower around my back as his gaze refocuses on me. “I’m assuming you don’t mean that in like an existential way.”
“No. Why did you come to Key West with me?”
“So you wouldn’t be alone,” he says.
“But why did you care?” I ask. The past tense feels wrong, though, considering the last few hours, so I amend it to, “Why do you care?”
He looks at me like I’m a particularly challenging crossword puzzle and he’s running out of easy clues so now must revisit the harder ones he’s been saving for later. The blue-gray eye looks frustrated. The brown one bemused. Taken together, though, they appear gently curious.
Maybe he won’t answer me at all. Maybe his reasons for everything he does are as selfish as he claims. But something inside me, the thing that wants to tell him that I’m falling in love with him, believes there’s more to this. More to us . And I want him to admit it.
Instead, he says, “My sister’s name is Rhiannon.”
“What?”
“My parents had a deal. Dad got to pick the first name for any boys. Mom got to pick for any girls. So, Dad named me after himself, and Mom named my sister after her favorite song.”
“Fleetwood Mac,” I whisper.
Hollis gives me a tiny smile, a new one that I can only describe as rueful.
“It’s been over ten years now, and I still.
.. Look, I don’t listen to songs that make me miss my mom, okay?
I don’t talk to my father about anything except baseball and books, and I don’t have sex with anyone who wants more from me than a fun time and a superficial friendship. ”
This last one feels like a rebuke. Like he can tell that I’m developing serious feelings for him and he’s pushing back against it, reminding me that was not the deal we made when we got involved.
I’m just another friend he sometimes sleeps with—a less voluptuous, much paler, redheaded Yeva Markarian.
“I don’t expect anything,” I say in a hurry.
“I know you don’t—that you aren’t—but, Hollis, you’re right.
I’ve lost so much lately, and I didn’t really deal with it.
Now, soon, I’m going to lose you too, and I don’t want to pretend I don’t feel anything about that.
Because if I pretend like it doesn’t hurt and bury myself in work or something, it’s only a matter of time until I completely lose my shit inside the Library of Congress, and they really frown upon wailing in the reading rooms. Wailing like crying, I mean.
Not whaling like... with boats and whales, although that would also—”
“Millicent,” Hollis whispers. “Stop talking. Please.”