Chapter 22 Vivian #2
“How so?” Shona’s eyes were large and doe-like. Vivian wanted to fall into them, the way she used to stare at her mother’s eyes when she was little and scraped up after a tumble.
Vivian thought of her mom again. She was a genuinely pleasing person, like Shona. But her mom, well, was too genteel to stand up to their father when Ryan had said he didn’t want to play football. Their dad insisted it was “nonnegotiable.”
He decreed it and therefore no bending or breaking his rules.
This rule’s logic went something like this: Boys need to play on a team so they can learn how to be a part of something bigger than themselves, so they learn how to cooperate and experience camaraderie, which in turn makes them successful humans.
Their dad had played football in high school and college.
He was convinced it had taught him how to succeed.
As a software engineer who’d helped launch numerous start-ups, he said playing football taught him how to be a team player.
He insisted his son should have the same experience. No, the same opportunity.
But Ryan didn’t see it as that. He saw it as a sentence.
During summer break, when Vivian was still home after her senior year in high school, when Ryan was entering his freshman year, she could remember the arguments.
Ryan insisted he didn’t want to play any sports at all, and her dad said that was not an option.
Ryan would come to Vivian to complain, to say that Dad didn’t get him, didn’t understand that team sports weren’t for him.
She had tried to explain to him that it wasn’t such an awful idea.
Secretly, she—athletic like their dad—had thought it would benefit him for all the same reasons Dad had mentioned.
Plus, she wanted more for her baby brother’s high school experience than always being the geeky kid. She wanted him to be accepted the way she was, to have ready-made friends that came with a team, maybe put some muscle on his lanky frame and some color to his cheeks so he could get a girl.
She didn’t say all this to him, but she’d thought it.
Ryan moved on to their mom, hoping she would strike a compromise.
“How about I join a club, like the kids that work on the yearbook?” he’d suggested.
“Or even the speech and debate team. You know how much I hate to be in front of people. That I’d be willing to do that shows you how much I don’t want to play. ”
Mom had smiled sweetly at him. “You could do both. Or even all three,” she said. “But you know how your dad is when he sets his mind to something.”
Later, he entered Vivian’s room while she got ready to go out with friends. She was getting tired of his protests. They had ended up in a fight, and he had called her a daddy’s girl, saying she went with everything he said because she was “superficial.”
Now Shona handed Vivian a steaming cup with the tea bag already in it and a spoon and a wedge of lemon on the saucer. She grabbed honey from a cabinet and set it before Vivian.
“That honey’s from the Flathead,” said Shona, “and they say you should always have local honey because it helps your system get used to all the hay-fever triggers around here.”
Vivian squeezed the plastic container and watched the golden gel stack up and swirl into her spoon and slowly ooze over into the cup. Vivian was fairly certain that if she asked Ryan about it, he’d tell her it was a myth, that local honey doesn’t ward off anything.
“You were saying,” Shona said. “It’s complicated?”
“Grief. It’s complex, because everyone has their own stuff to deal with as they process their own loss, but at the same time, they have to deal with the other person’s shit, too.
I think all the signals go haywire. It’s why so many couples don’t make it after .
. .” Vivian petered out because a lump had suddenly formed and congested in her throat.
“I totally understand,” Shona said. “Your parents? Are they getting any help? Doing any counseling?”
“It’s touch and go, as you can imagine.”
“I can’t, really. I just can’t, them losing their son like that and how that must put a type of poison into the relationship.”
Poison? The word had made Vivian flinch, as if Shona had jabbed her with one of her phlebotomy needles.
But there was also something freeing in how Shona didn’t shy away from the topic.
“That’s one way to put it,” Vivian said. “You should see how my mom looks at my dad. So much anger. And he at her with nothing but disappointment. It’s, I don’t know, it’s so sad.”
Shona’s eyes were wide and understanding. “You know.” She held out a palm. “There are groups for this kind of thing. In one of my community health classes, we had a woman who runs a grief group come speak to us. I could get you her name if you wanted.”
“Nah, that’s okay. I mean, I’m fine.”
“Okay, well, there are other resources, too. Stuff online, books. We’ve had all sorts of guest speakers come into my class. Some are super interesting. I can look into some stuff for you.” She smiled.
Vivian felt guilt rise in her, like she was betraying the only family she had left, deceiving her parents, who she knew were in so much pain, like she was.
To quell the swelling guilt, Vivian tried distracting herself by thinking of the guest speaker due to visit her own bio class in the morning.
It didn’t stick, though. The fact was, sitting here with her new friend, it felt good—damn good—to talk, like she was dislodging sediment in a floodplain.
Shona’s voice, in fact, her whole appearance was like that golden honey she’d drizzled into her tea—smooth and comforting.
Hey, Ryan, is it true that locally made honey helps your immune system against resident allergens?
In her own apartment, Vivian felt hungry and dug out a frozen pizza from the freezer. When it was ready, she ate it at the counter while she read from her textbook. She left a few pieces for Logan, who she knew would be ravenous when he came over after work.
But he didn’t come over. He called and told her he’d been invited along with some of the guys on a backcountry winter camping trip. Too good to pass up. They were leaving early in the morning, and he needed to get his gear in order.
Vivian sighed quietly so he couldn’t hear. She felt abandoned, but she knew that was irrational. She told him to have fun.
Whatever newfound energy she’d discovered after talking to Shona drained away. A part of her was glad he wasn’t coming; another part was caught in a purgatory between empty fatigue and a nameless desire to do something, anything, but she had no idea what.
Hey, Ryan, I know you know what dysthymic means.
The next day around the same time, Vivian looked out her window to the parking area below as Shona pulled up. She grabbed her pack from the back seat of her car, swung it over her shoulder, and walked gingerly over the icy lot to the staircase.
Vivian gave her time to settle in, then texted her and asked her what she was up to. Shona replied, The usual, with an emoji of a textbook. What about you?
Twenty minutes later, Vivian was back in Shona’s kitchen. Shona made a mini pot of coffee with a powerful aroma.
“Figured we needed the caffeine.” She poured Vivian a cup as she took a seat at the white counter.
“Perfect.” Vivian smiled.
Vivian told Shona that Logan had gone camping. “It’s like he’s made to be on the move,” Vivian said. “Like my dad.”
“Outdoorsy?”
“Not like Logan with the backcountry, but he was a jock in high school and college. Track and field, football, and basketball. All the team sports. He got one of those all-state awards. Played football in college, too.”
Shona laughed. “Sounds like my dad.” She explained how her father was raised in a small town in eastern Montana, Havre, and that he went to Montana State University in Bozeman, where he became a linebacker for the Cats.
Vivian must have made a funny face because Shona said, “What?”
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
She let it out. She told Shona how her father had forced Ryan to join the JV team, how her mom didn’t stick up for Ryan and was always so silent. How all the teams went on a preseason retreat to build camaraderie up at a camp with all these cabins on Whistler Mountain.
“That sounds fun. Didn’t your brother enjoy that?”
She poured it out while Shona listened.
She had been going into one of the bars on the main drag in Whitefish.
She’d finally met some other local instructors—two girls her age—on her own, not through Logan.
She’d met them at a preseason instructor meeting, and they’d invited her out.
Both, on the offseason, worked at a lodge on the lake right below the ski hill.
Vivian couldn’t wait to pick the instructor’s brain. She had driven to the small town twenty minutes north of Kalispell, parked by the train station, and was walking toward the bar where she was to meet them when her phone buzzed.
It was Ryan. She’d picked it up, thinking it would be quick. She knew he was at the retreat. “Hey, little bro, what’s up?”
“Um, not much.” He sounded nervous.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, irritation creeping up in her.
“Uh, nothing. Just wanted to talk.”
“How’s the retreat?”
“Fine. I mean, it’s . . .”
Vivian usually would have pushed, asked, It’s what? What’s the problem? But she was already running a little late and she didn’t want the others to leave the bar to go to another before she got there.
Instead, she said, “Good. Okay, glad things are fine.”
He went silent.
“Ryan?”
He didn’t answer.
“Ryan, look, I gotta go. But is everything okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t sound like himself. That was the first time she wondered if maybe it wasn’t such a great idea for her dad to push him so hard. She knew it would only take a bit of prodding to pry him open, to give him permission to vent.