Chapter Twenty-Three
In the minutes after Hazel left his room, Ash paced. He texted, knowing she wouldn’t respond. He paced some more.
The blazer Hazel had worn last night lay rumpled on his floor. He balled it up and threw it into his closet. The soft impact was completely unsatisfying. He threw his shoes in after it, and they smacked against the closet wall.
Then, he hoisted up the box of ornaments he’d taken back from her house and let it fly. It sailed into the wall above his nightstand, contents raining down onto the table, his bed, the floor. A plastic ball ornament rolled across the carpet and stopped at his feet, his ignorantly happy eight-year-old face on the inserted picture beaming up at him. He kicked it, and it shot straight at the water cup he’d filled for Hazel last night.
“Fucking great,” he muttered at the wet spot on the carpet. Destruction of his own belongings would not extinguish the burning anger in his chest. Some part of him knew this. But the tiny release of so much pent-up, suffocating tension promised more relief. He spotted the wooden baseball bat propped in the corner.
Ash hadn’t held one in years, hadn’t even played intramural softball in college. He lifted it, rotated it in a circle with a simple turn of his wrist, tucked it to his shoulder. It felt good. He was strangely ahead of himself, warning, Do not put a hole in a wall, while also drunk on the weight of the bat, how it seemed to have been left there for this exact occasion.
And then he looked up at the Popsicle stick chandelier he’d made the year before he met Hazel, before his father got sick, before he’d ever really wanted something he couldn’t will into existence. He swung. The sticks burst from the impact, a candyless pi?ata raining splinters down over him, scattering across the carpet. For one heartbeat, it was deeply satisfying, this breaking.
In the next moment, however, on his reckless follow-through, the bat smashed into the model of Maggie’s house on the dresser, crunching through Cosette and Isabel’s meticulously rendered pink-and-purple bedroom and sending the whole thing onto the floor.
“Shit.” Anger flared again, this time at himself, at the bat, at Hazel, at the model for being in the wrong place. It was badly damaged. His first impulse was to obliterate it entirely, take out all the anger still pulsing in him. But the feeling waned, smothered by heavy regret. An ache pressed into his throat. He let the bat fall to the carpet.
Ash blinked up from the model at the sound of knocking on his door. He’d waffled on whether to repair the damage or shop for new gifts for his nieces at the last minute. All his usual tools and paints sat out of reach at his apartment, so he’d raided his mother’s art supplies in the garage and was making them work, sort of. He’d just have to accept some imperfections.
June called impatiently through the door. “Are you clothed?”
“No.”
She entered anyway, one hand plastered across her eyes, the other holding two mugs of coffee, one of which tilted and dripped onto the carpet. She parted her fingers and scoffed. “Liar.”
“What do you want?”
She set one of the mugs on his dresser and cupped the other thoughtfully under her chin, openly surveying the wreckage around him. “So, what’d you do?” At his frown, she added, “Her car was here last night. Now it’s not. We thought you had both gone, but Mom heard you hulking out up here earlier.”
She sat on his bed, plucked an errant Popsicle stick from under her thigh, and tossed it into the trash bin. “There was a small chance she was still here, and you two were just into some weird, BDSM—”
“June,” he warned tiredly.
“What? Like I wanted to come up here and see things I’d have to bleach from my brain later?”
“She’s not here.” Fuck, it hurt to say it out loud.
“And the parting was such sweet sorrow?” she said, morphing into a Shakespearean player. She was so irritatingly June, nosy, intrusive, perfectly capable of reading a room but always going for the joke anyway. “You missed breakfast. And now it’s starting to feel like you’re avoiding us. On Christmas Eve Eve.”
Ash glued a new piece of trim to the model wall. He didn’t have time to chat, nor did he want to address the accusation that he was avoiding everyone when they were the ones who had iced him out over the hospital visit.
“So, what happened? I mean, you’re usually pretty uptight, but you actually seemed kind of normal around her,” June said.
“I’m not uptight.”
A hyena laugh burst out of her.
“Yeah, well, you don’t know as much as you think you do. There are things on my plate that no one expects of you.”
“Oh,” June said, nodding. “You mean like you guys hiding shit from me? Yeah, it must have been tough to be trusted with what was going on with dad all these years.”
“That—” he started. He’d never considered that they’d been bad at keeping the details hidden or that his sisters might resent the protection.
“So, what happened with Hazel?”
He sighed. “I told you. She left.”
“Because…”
“Because…I don’t know. Because she has a shitty relationship with her parents, and she had a shitty first boyfriend, and now she thinks every relationship can only be shitty.”
“Okay. Were you guys in a relationship?”
“Barely.” He ran a hand over his hair in frustration. “I mean, yeah, it was going somewhere. It was real. She just didn’t think it could end up any other way. And I—I got too involved with her issues with her dad, and that didn’t help.”
June nodded, suddenly affecting some serene therapist. “So, you went with her story?”
“What?”
“That things couldn’t end up another way.”
“No. She didn’t give me a choice. She left.”
“Okay, so you’re just sitting here feeling sorry for yourself? It’s not like she’s Liam Neeson’s daughter in Taken. And you have this newfangled thing called a phone. Call her.”
“June,” he said, frustrated. “She’s ignoring my texts. Even if I knew where she was, she made it pretty clear she wants space. She has this thing with afters.” He waved off her confusion. “I’m sure this will shock you, but me trying to fix things is part of the fucking problem. She asked for space. If I go after her, I’ll just push her away more.”
June cast him an uncharacteristically sympathetic look. “That’s quite an impasse.”
“Did you come up here just to make me feel worse?”
“No. I’m really sorry. I like Hazel. I like you with Hazel.” She nodded at the model. “Do you need help with that?”
The word no was right there on the tip of his tongue, but he took a breath. “Actually, yeah, I do.”
At lunch, Hazel’s father called the landline.
Ash took the wireless receiver down the hall to the bathroom and locked himself in, saying carefully, “Hi, Mr. Elliot. Hazel’s not here.”
There was a long pause. “Okay. I understand you feel protective of my daughter.”
“I’m not covering for her. She’s really not here,” he said. His jaw and fists clenched with a surge of bitterness. If Dan hadn’t pushed him to explain Hazel’s outburst at the party, she would still be here.
But the fight left him as soon as Dan said, “I’m sorry if I put you in a tough position last night. I was—I am—” He cleared his throat. “Would you pass along that I’d like to talk when she’s ready?”
“Wish I could.” Ash rubbed his face. As much as he blamed Dan for last night and for all the mistakes he’d made with Hazel before, Ash heard the man’s weariness and guilt and found a pocket of compassion amidst the anger. Ash wasn’t blameless, either. “She’s…not answering my messages right now.”
“Oh.”
“I guess she didn’t go home?”
“No.”
Ash sat on the edge of the tub. He’d tried not to imagine Hazel behind the wheel as upset as she’d been this morning.
“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”
Ash squeezed his neck. “Back to her apartment? Maybe Houston to see her old roommate?”
“All right. I’ve got to make some more calls then.”
“Sir? Could you…”
“I’ll let you know when I find her.”
Ash gave him his cell number, and they hung up.
When he brought the phone back to the kitchen, his mother had cleared the dishes. He could hear June’s lilting voice belting out instructions to walk like an elephant, then a series of big and small thudding steps tromping through a back bedroom. He raised his eyebrows at his parents, Leanne, and Laurel, sitting in silence.
“June told us you and Hazel had a fight. I’m sorry,” his mother said.
“I don’t really want to talk right now.”
She pulled out his chair. “Tough. Sit.”
Reluctantly, he did.
His father slid a check across the table to him, nodded to the twins, who fidgeted in their seats.
“What is this?”
“The money you gave us,” Leanne said.
“We’ve been earning it back,” Laurel added. “And we’re sorry we lied to you.”
“And we won’t ever do it again.”
“Okay. Thanks,” he said, eyeing the check and then his sisters’ contrite faces, “but I don’t need this.”
His mom nudged the check closer. “Put it toward a new car.”
“No, Mom,” he said, pushing it back. “I really don’t need it. I have savings. I have plenty.”
“So do we.”
“It’s time to do things differently,” his father said. “Girls, you can go.”
Laurel’s and Leanne’s chair legs scraped with the urgency of their departure. His sisters offered identical sheepish smiles, and even though physical contact of any kind felt like it might crack him open right now, he pulled them each in for a quick hug before they retreated to their room.
“Do what differently?” he said on a sigh, sitting back down.
“It’s come to my attention that I’m not the easiest patient.” His father popped his knuckles, and Ash realized he was doing the same thing under the table. “Well, I already knew that, I guess. What I’ve really come to see is that my frustration with my…uh, limitations, puts other people—your mother, you—in the position of having to manage more than what’s fair.”
Ash’s mother cut in. “For the record, supporting you isn’t a burden. We’ve both needed each other at different times, and that’s as it’s supposed to be. No one’s keeping count.”
He nodded. “The burden I mean is my pride about it, my occasional desire to reject all the support. Feels like people telling me what to do, fretting over me, managing me, even though I know it’s only you all wanting me to stay healthy. You,” he said, meeting Ash’s eyes, “don’t know if you can trust me to take care of myself. I hate that you’ve taken that on. I hate that you’ve planned your whole life around that. So, here’s the deal, son. I’m taking responsibility for myself. And your mom has my back. And beyond that, there are doctors, health insurance, home care if or when it comes to that, all the safety nets that mean our kids don’t have to limit their lives just in case things go south.”
Ash’s mother leaned across the table toward him, her expression pleading, a little watery even, which put Ash on high alert. She shook her head at his sudden straightening but doubled down on her imploring expression. “The only person we need you to take care of is yourself.”
“I do take care of myself.”
“You’re living like you expect the sky to fall. And like you’re the only one who could hold it up. I know you don’t want to accept it, but you can’t stop the inevitable. Not the people you love having infuriating minds of their own, and not the MS.”
Ash swallowed. His throat felt thick and tight.
“And because you can’t stop it, you should choose what makes you happy now, and trust that you’ll rise to the occasion when you need to. Don’t deny yourself the comforts you can afford. Don’t put off having what you want. Because, who knows, a meteor could wipe us all out tomorrow anyway.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
“Well?” She shrugged.
The irony of her telling him this today burned. Hazel made him happy. She was the first thing in a long time that did. Her laugh, the big, loud version of it when amusement snuck up on her and she couldn’t filter it. That was all he wanted. Her, laughing like that. But the way she’d left, the finality of it—he couldn’t see how to fix it. He’d overstepped with his parents in the hospital, and even though he’d tried to avoid the same mistake with Hazel—had heard what she was saying, knew how scared she was—he’d pushed too hard with her, too. And now he didn’t even know where she was, or if she’d ever hear him out.
“I cannot emphasize enough how badly we want that for you,” his mom continued. “The freedom to live an ordinary, happy life, based on what you want, not what you imagine everyone else needs.” She swiped a tear from her cheek, and Ash had to blink away the sting in his own eyes.
“Okay,” he said, partly to stop her from crying over him and partly because…he did want that. An ordinary, happy life.
“You’ll try?”
He hardly knew what that would even look like. His life felt like a game of Whac-A-Mole, and he got so caught up in the urgency of bashing down every new problem that it never occurred to him to set down the mallet and let the game play itself out. That was essentially what they were asking him to do, wasn’t it? Not attempt to stem the tide of his dad’s illness. Not to write the ending of a story before he was even through the twisting, turning middle. Let it play out.
If he didn’t follow his usual instincts with Hazel, if he gave her the space she’d asked for, she might just run and never look back. That was a real possibility.
But a lot of things that he’d never thought possible had also happened this week. And they’d happened because he hadn’t been the only one in the driver’s seat. Hell, from the start of this, Hazel had literally taken the wheel. He could give up control, as scary as that was.
Ash nodded toward his father and said, “If he can try, I can try.”