Chapter 6
C HAPTER 6
Present Day
We stumbled off the flight, gritty-eyed and crispy. I had managed to sleep thanks to the pills, but it had been an uncomfortable sleep. I’d been curled ferociously against the hard plastic window cover because I didn’t want to accidentally shift my weight and find myself snuggling with Ryan.
No .
Noah was sent off into his own lane for citizens reentering the country while the Americans were funneled into a much more crowded customs line. I didn’t have any experience with this kind of thing so I watched Ryan closely, as he handled every stage with ease.
I didn’t have contraband in my suitcase, but I did know a sudden fear that I could be an unknowing drug mule.
Or that I’d brought a suspicious amount of aspirin.
But when we finally got through, and into the domestic terminal of the Auckland airport, I could breathe again. Except then we were getting on another plane, and it was too short of a flight for me to take pills. Plus, I had just slept for about ten hours.
Ryan and I were not seated together on that flight. He was in the row behind me, praise be.
Noah had warned all of us that flying into Queenstown could be rough and bumpy, since you came in over a significant mountain range.
I found that helped. If I could expect rough air, then I at least knew it wasn’t some anomaly, or an impending accident.
I felt cocooned by my jetlag. By the sense of floating I had felt since I got off the last plane.
And when we landed, I actually opened my window shade and watched as we descended with snowy mountains all around us.
It was too beautiful for my anxiety to ruin.
It was a miracle.
As we got off the plane, we walked down the stairs onto the tarmac. It was cold outside, jarring considering we had just left the intensity of summer back in Oregon.
The wind was blowing, with a biting chill, and I reflexively reached for my phone to snap a picture of the mountains around us.
“No photos on the tarmac,” a flight attendant shouted at me as I raised my phone.
I stuffed it in my pocket, feeling like an idiot. Doing the wrong thing and getting scolded like that was the kind of thing that had the power to ruin my day.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Ryan.
I hadn’t realized that he was standing so close to me.
“I wasn’t worried about it.” A lie.
I would be worried about it all day. I’d broken a rule. Even if on accident. I would replay that moment over and over for nights to come. It might even join my All Time Greatest Hits of Times I Did the Wrong Thing . A favorite slide show of mine to run before I went to sleep.
“You worry about everything,” he said.
“Not sharks, Ryan,” I replied. “Because I know exactly how they attack.”
Then Quinn caught up with me and grabbed my arm, pulling me away from Ryan. “How were you? That flight from LA was so long!”
“Oh fine. Did you enjoy your pasta and lobster up in the front of the plane?”
Quinn laughed. “We had venison. And it was delicious. Thanks.”
“We got suspicious eggs and a granola bar. But I’m happy for you.”
I really was.
About all the things. All of them.
The airport in Queenstown was much smaller than the giant hub in Auckland, and we quickly got our bags, and linked up with two of Noah’s other groomsmen who had flown in from Auckland. Then we ended up in an endless line at the rental car counter.
Quinn had insisted that we have a couple of cars between us. Though, I knew that I was not driving on the wrong side of the road. No thank you.
Ryan clearly had no such issues, as he was named one of the drivers, with Noah acting as another – for now. He and Quinn didn’t have their own house or car yet – they would move into a place they’d already secured and sort out all the permanent living issues after their honeymoon.
Ryan ended up chauffeuring the groomsmen, with Noah driving me and Quinn.
I was annoyed to realize that some tension in my chest seized without Ryan in proximity.
Annoyed that he affected me at all.
We had a large vacation rental on Lake Wakatipu, and I had of course done my due diligence on that. Meaning that I had looked at all the photographs and done a mental walk-through.
I wouldn’t be sharing a bedroom because the other bridesmaids weren’t arriving until later, but the groomsmen were going to be stacked two to a bedroom. According to the itinerary that Quinn had presented us all with, that wouldn’t matter, because we were going to be falling onto our mattresses completely exhausted, and the guys probably wouldn’t even notice that they had a roommate.
I was excited about it.
I felt completely disoriented sitting in the backseat of the car, with the driver on the wrong side, and the turns taking us across lanes when I didn’t expect them to.
But that was only a distraction for a moment, because soon the scenery took over completely.
It wasn’t completely unlike Oregon, and yet it was.
The snowcapped Remarkables truly lived up to their name, tall and imposing on the other side of the lake. When the wind whipped up, the waves in the water looked like an ocean, rather than the contained body of water that it was.
We bypassed town, going straight to the vacation rental, which was on the outskirts, an easy walking path promising a fifteen-minute walk down to all of the restaurants and shopping.
The house was positioned on a hill, with three floors, each with balconies that made the most of the stunning view.
We pulled in at the same time as Ryan and the car that contained two other groomsmen. They’d flown in from Auckland, and there was one other groomsman who lived in Queenstown and would be hooking up with us for other wedding festivities.
I could see why Quinn wanted to move here.
I could see why she was embracing the adventure.
And while part of me – the bitter, broken-hearted part of me – had wanted to be bitter that she was doing it for a man, or at least afraid that she was doing it for a man, I realized then that she wasn’t.
Yes, he was part of it. Loving him was part of it, but this would be an adventure regardless.
And no matter what happened, Quinn would never regret she’d tried this.
“Okay,” I said. “I get it.”
Quinn turned from the passenger seat and looked at me. “It’s really different.”
“But it’s beautiful.”
“I never thought that I would move so far away,” Quinn said. “But everything about it feels right.”
Noah smiled. “Glad to be one of the things that feel right.”
“You most of all,” she said.
My eyes felt extra gritty then, and I tried to ignore that.
They pulled the car into the garage, and I got out. “It was very clear on the instructions for the vacation rental that we are to take our shoes off,” Quinn said, in a very stern and maternal voice.
“Oh good,” one of the guys said, as he crowded into the garage. “I love house rules.”
He turned to me, and grinned. “I’m Trev. What’s your name?”
“If you fuckin’ hit on my future wife’s friends I’ll kill you, mate,” Noah said.
I was about to say something that I’m sure would’ve been super witty. What else could it have been, when I was jetlagged and exhausted? But then Ryan walked forward, all of us bottlenecking in the door between the house and the garage, and I raced forward, kicking my shoes off as quickly as possible.
The entryway was small, with just a staircase leading up to the main part of the house.
I raced up the stairs, making exclamations about the view and the beauty of the house.
Quinn came up behind me. “He’s harmless,” she whispered.
“Who?”
“Trev.”
Oh right. Trev. She didn’t know that Trev wasn’t the source of my reaction. It was just the idea of getting stuck in that tight space with Ryan.
I took a circuit through the living room, looking out the window at the lake below, and at the glorious view of the mountains.
“I thought maybe we could go to town and do some shopping,” asked Quinn.
“I thought we were doing all nature adventures,” I said.
Quinn wrinkled her nose. “Well. We will be doing some of that. I know Ryan has a bunch of photography spots he wants to hit, and Noah of course wants to accommodate our matchmaker.”
I made a growling sound in the back of my throat. “You give him way too much credit.”
“If not for him we would never have met.”
“If not for a moldy petri dish we wouldn’t have penicillin.”
Quinn snorted. “I’m actually not sure if that’s supposed to be insulting or . . .”
Ryan appeared then on the landing. “Was it about me? Because if so then it was meant to be insulting.”
I flashed him a wide, fake smile.
“You two have to get along,” she said. “This is our wedding.”
“The whole two weeks isn’t your wedding,” I said.
“Yes it is. It’s the sacred bubble of my wedding. All of Queenstown is the sacred bubble of my wedding. Indeed, the entire South Island.”
“I like that about you,” said Noah.
The men brought all the suitcases upstairs, and then I dragged mine up another flight of stairs to the small bedroom at the top.
I heard the door close in the hall across from me, but didn’t see who had occupied the space.
Instead, I decided to get dressed and head to town with Quinn. If I sat down for too long then I was going to fall asleep, and I was determined to make sure that I didn’t let jetlag win.
We decided to walk along the lake, past other vacation rentals, and through a park, down a winding path that led into town. Queenstown was filled with lovely stone buildings, delicious restaurants and adorable boutiques, and I played my favorite game where I imagined what my life would be like here.
I thought about having a bakery wedged in between the Irish pub and the coffee house.
We got ice cream at a place that made their own treats, and made our way to a shop with massive sculptures made of Greenstone, then on to look at lovely wool products, which were an essential New Zealand item.
It was a country known for its sheep, and therefore its exquisitely lovely yarn and sweaters.
“So,” said Quinn. “Are you going to hook up with Trev?”
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“He’s clearly interested.”
“And I believe your fiancée told him not to touch me.”
“Sure. But . . . Trev is hot, and he also doesn’t listen. At least, if I’m going off of every story that Noah has ever told me about him.”
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t considering that.”
I felt extremely uncomfortable, and I shouldn’t. Quinn was my best friend, we talked about sex. We talked about men.
But there was something extraordinarily uncomfortable about the conversation given some of the context.
The context about Ryan. And the fifth wedding.
Which I had no desire to relive. Thank you.
There’s a reason I haven’t spoken about it out loud ever to anyone. Not even Quinn. A reason it lives behind a blockade in my brain so that I don’t even think about it.
“You need to get back out there,” she said.
“Counterpoint: why?”
“Because I’m worried about you, because I selfishly want to know that you’re going to be okay?”
“And fucking your groomsman who lives in another country is going to make you feel better?”
“No. Okay. He isn’t specifically going to solve that, I guess. Though, you could marry him and move to New Zealand.”
“I’m not leaving Pineville,” I said. “My grandma’s house is there. My grandma is buried there. The bakery is there. My business . . .”
“My family is there. But I’m leaving. For love.”
“That’s great. And you’re right, Trev is hot. But I don’t think he’s the love of my life. And anyway, I’m not looking for the love of my life.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . . I don’t need it to be happy. I have enough. Because . . . Quinn, you’re one of the loves of my life. And I’m going to have to deal with the fact that you’re moving away. I can’t replace you with some guy.”
Quinn wrinkled her nose. “I know. You’re one of the loves of my life too. That’s why this sucks so much. If I hate it here, he will move to the States for me.”
“Oh hell no. Stay in New Zealand. I’ll visit. Please don’t change anything because of me.”
“Why should I not change something because of you?”
“Because . . . because this is your real life, with your husband. And I’m . . .”
“It isn’t ridiculous to think that people might make different decisions because of you, Poppy. You’re that important to me.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling my chest get tight. I believed her. I did, and that was a really difficult thing for me in most cases. But even though I believed her, I also knew that you didn’t up and change your plans for your married life because of your best friend. You had to marry and make your spouse the person that you made decisions around. Not the sad girl that you adopted like a stray animal when you were in second grade. It was fair. And it was fine.
I understood.
But it hurt.
“Anyway,” I said. “A man is going to cause me more problems than he’s going to solve. So you can’t try and mitigate my sadness by hooking me up with somebody.”
“I’m just still mad that Josh broke up with you.”
“ Are you?” I’d never had the impression Quinn was all that attached to Josh.
Quinn’s forehead wrinkled. “I’m mad that you don’t have a built-in family back in Pineville. I guess you could . . . visit your mother?”
“Do you know what my mom’s Wikipedia page says?”
“No. Weirdly, I have not googled your mom recently.”
I had. But that was because my relationship with her was mostly confined to what different gossip sites said about her.
“It doesn’t even say that she has a child. You know, normally it’s in the little table of stats on the side. Or at least down under personal life . I’m not even mentioned. There are a couple of lovers, a marriage or three. But no child.”
I had thought often that it would’ve been more hurtful if she would’ve gone off and had other children, or some otherwise totally stable personal life. So, I did feel that perhaps I should be grateful that at the very least she had proven to be entirely uninterested in motherhood regardless of what stage of life she was in. It wasn’t personal, in other words. Which was good to know.
“That really sucks,” she said.
“It only sucks because Gran is gone. Because now I feel . . . I don’t know. Like I’m missing something, and I didn’t for a really long time. Because of Gran. It sucks, but what can you even do about it?”
“I guess if you really want to, you try to see about building a relationship.”
“And get rejected.”
“Maybe she wouldn’t reject you.”
“I feel like if she was in a space to be accepting of me, I would at least appear on her Wikipedia page, and I am quite certain that she sees to the edits on there personally.”
I reached out and squeezed her arm. “Quinn,” I said. “All the other bridesmaids that are coming here are my friends too. I work at the bakery, I make cakes. I am not going to be by myself. Just because I’m not looking for the same thing that you have, doesn’t mean that I’m sad.”
“But you wanted it for a long time. You used to have bridal magazines hidden under your bed.”
“Yeah. But that was back when I imagined that things were different when you were in a relationship, and now I know they aren’t. Now I know that it isn’t all about a fantasy wedding. It’s about spending your life with somebody, and that somebody could change their mind. I just don’t want to do it again. I don’t want to invest all that time and have somebody walk out the door. I have worked way too damned hard at being a little bit more stable with my abandonment issues.”
“And now I’m leaving you. I really feel like an asshole.”
“Please don’t. Please. Because I can’t bear it. I honestly can’t. If you feel bad about making this amazing leap because of me, then I really am going to feel like an inconvenience. I mean, miss me, please, but don’t feel bad.”
“Well, how about I feel bad, but I do it anyway. Because I love him. And I’m actually looking forward to a little bit of a fresh start. I love Pineville too, don’t get me wrong. But you live somewhere all of your life and you have such a prescribed role that you fill. I am the accountant’s daughter. And I myself am an accountant. And not in a sexy, euphemistic way. Just an accountant. And people don’t understand . . . they think that I’m boring. And no, I didn’t think that I was boring. Noah met me, and he didn’t have all these years of assumptions about me. He didn’t see me and think of me as Roger’s daughter.”
It was to me funny that it bothered her. Because I love nothing more than being Rose’s granddaughter. I love having ties. Links. I loved being known. Because I knew what it was like to bounce around, to know nobody. To have no friends. To feel like you were invisible to your own mother.
To have a father that you didn’t even . . .
“There’s no real happy medium, is there?” I asked. “I don’t even know who my dad is.”
“Have you ever thought about looking for him? DNA testing or . . . door knocking around Hollywood?”
“Yes. I have. Or at least trying to ask my mom again, but . . . I don’t know. It’s another person to be disappointed by, and should I not be doing like, shadow work on myself, to make it so that I’m not so dependent on people?”
She laughed. “We’re all kind of dependent on people.”
“Well, I don’t like it. It’s shitty.”
“No argument from me.”
“Except all the people that you love stay with you,” I said. I meant to say it light. But it came out a little bit heavier than I intended it to.
“Oh, Poppy.”
“Don’t. Don’t make the Sad Poppy face at me. I’m not sad. I’m not.” I grimaced. “Okay, I’m a little bit sad.”
“Your mom literally plays a mom on TV, but never parented you.”
I couldn’t help it, I laughed. It was absurd. Painful too, of course, but everything with my mother was. She couldn’t have just abandoned me, oh no. She had to abandon me in a way that meant I’d see her on billboards everywhere.
“I know. She’s ridiculous. Everything is ridiculous.” I shook my head. “But I have an excuse to come to New Zealand now.”
“And you hate flying.”
“I know. I do. So maybe that’s the growth that I’m making. Trust me. I’m fine.”
If I kept saying it, then it would be true. Except really, it was. I needed to be fine because my life was mine. Nobody could live it for me. Nobody could physically fill that yawning void inside of me that had been placed there by my mother when I was seven years old.
It was just work that I had to do. I understood that. It was on me. On me to sort out all of it.
“Let’s head back,” I said.
“Yeah. Sounds good. We want to go to the ice bar tonight.”
“That sounds freezing. I think I’ll stay behind.”
“It’ll be fun.”
“You’re just trying to matchmake me with Trev.”
She snorted. “You know, there is a difference between a relationship and sex. Maybe I’m just looking out for your orgasm tally.”
“No offense, but I don’t think a guy named Trev is going to help with my orgasm tally.”
“Way harsh, Poppy.”
I grinned. “A little bit. Anyway. I’m not concerned about it. I am much more interested in the mountains than in men. Right now.”
I felt guilty. Because I had never told her . . .
But there were just some things that had to stay private.
There were just some things you needed to keep to yourself.
What happened at the fifth wedding was one of them.