Chapter Nine
CHAPTER NINE
I have a restless night’s sleep that night.
It’s somewhere between the wakeful Christmas Eve feeling I used to have as a kid and the panicked, anxious feeling I get before an early flight or an audition.
Any dreams I do have are about missing my alarm clock, but mostly it’s the sort of semiconscious rest where I spend the entire night aware of the passing time.
It’s not the worry over accidentally sleeping through our meeting time—even I can’t sleep past noon, and I haven’t since I had mono as a teenager.
It’s the fact, of course, that I’m going to see Aimee.
I honestly don’t believe it will happen.
But the proof will be in the intergalactic pudding.
It’s hard enough to believe I heard her voice.
It keeps ringing in my head.
Impatient and irritated, so the romance is a little marred by that.
But still.
It’s her.
When I do wake up, I expect to see Kiera, who slept on the pullout mattress in the sofa with Maureen.
She said usually we bunk in my room together, but since I’m having the world’s longest moment of confusion , she decided to sleep out there.
Instead, there’s a note on the table.
G’mornin’ Crazy!
Visiting round my mam’s today, but I’ll be back tonight.
Doctor’s orders.
Maybe some Indian takeaway for dinner?
Xx, Kiera
I set it down, feeling grateful that she’s coming back.
It’s a little weird without her here.
At this point it feels like it would be easy to float off into the clouds of Cuckoo Land, but her presence makes me feel tethered.
I look at my phone.
It’s ten.
I put Maureen’s leash on, thinking I really ought to get her back to Cillian soon, and then take her for a walk.
Avalon is really gorgeous.
I can’t stop marveling at the power of the quiet.
No shrilling emergency vehicles, no one shouting conspiracy theories punctuated with “and that’s what they want you to think!” on a street corner, no metallic revving of power tools, no cars whizzing by at fifty miles an hour.
The streets aren’t littered with disused office chairs and mattresses.
I’m sure there are times when these things (some of them anyway) might be heard, but it’s clear that here it is at least rare.
I’m starting to feel like the city has been psychically draining my energy every day and I didn’t know it.
Not even to mention the pressure of my work and the scathing hatred of the internet.
As I look up at the sky, smell the fresh nature around me, and walk down the winding roads, I feel like maybe this is what I need.
That even if this is all a hallucination, it’s because my mind is desperate for a break.
All I can hear is my own Reebok Club Cs (well, they’re my other me’s shoes, but that still counts as mine, I think) on the ground, Maureen’s trotting paws beside me, the wind in the grass and trees.
I haven’t missed my constant stream of newsfeeds or podcasts.
Of course, given everything, my mind is busy already and doesn’t need the extra stimulation, but honestly it feels like even given everything, I am still more relaxed and untroubled than usual.
What does that say about my quality of life?
I let Maureen lead me, it seems we have a path we like to walk, and eventually she guides me home, where I feed her and then glance at the time.
No rush.
As eager as I am to see Aimee, I can also appreciate the fact that I don’t have to dash anywhere.
In LA, my routine is a dry, hurried, but boring part of the day, including celery juice and a slow scramble of unseasoned egg whites (if I’m not intermittent fasting), an upsetting number of vitamins and supplements, followed by an hour on the Peloton and sometimes a soak in the cold plunge tub (hell) or a few minutes in the sauna (better hell).
But here, I put on some music, find some Greek yogurt in the fridge, and top it with granola.
I make a cup of coffee, add the fresh cream I find on the top shelf of the fridge, add a few pumps of vanilla syrup, and sit down to go through the pictures on the phone.
My phone.
The one filled with proof of another life I might have led.
It’s strange.
It’s kind of like an ultra-curated Instagram feed of images guaranteed to catch my interest.
Lots of food, drinks, and selfies.
People and places I don’t know but I can see why I took a picture.
There are lots of Cillian and Kiera.
I click on a video.
It was taken at the pub—the doctor might have been right that I am there too much—and it’s a slow zoom on Cillian behind the bar.
When he catches me filming, he looks irritated, but in that somewhat adoring way of his that I’m coming to recognize.
“Cut that out,” he says from the distance between us.
“What?” comes my voice, feigning innocence.
He gives a casual wink and then takes someone’s order.
“He’s so hot,” I say.
Then I recognize Kiera’s voice in the background saying, “You two, I swear.”
I watch it twice more.
I agree with other-world me.
Cillian is so…
ugh.
Hot isn’t even the right word.
I sit back, drinking my coffee and sliding through more pictures.
It looks like such a good life.
So warm and filled with love and friendship and laughter.
And maybe I’m focusing too much on it, but food .
Real food!
But where is Aimee?
I think for a moment, and then open the Hidden Photos folder.
It needs my Face ID but then it unlocks.
In it is a treasure trove.
It feels a little like invading someone else’s privacy to look.
As I predicted, there are a fair number of nudes.
Not that many, but some.
I look pretty good, I decide, though I can see that I used some unfortunate photo editing in some of them.
I mean, even in LA, my waist isn’t that small.
I inspect them all with strange fascination.
But it’s not only nudes that I wanted to hide.
It’s also a lot of normal pictures of Aimee, of me and Aimee, of Kiera and Aimee.
And then of a couple of kids that I assume must be hers.
It’s a thrill to see her life go on past nineteen, but also terribly melancholy.
This is the life she was supposed to live.
I know it.
There she is with a toddler on her lap and a glass of champagne in her hand, a tray of chipped ice and oysters in front of her, water and blue sky behind her.
Then another where she feeds the little girl a bite of buttered bread and she strains in her mother’s arms.
They and several others from the same day are geotagged in Galway.
An odd feeling creeps in as I see the photos.
It’s not like a memory, but I can deeply imagine the sense of being there.
The breeze from the water, the briny taste of the oysters and that cucumber mignonette.
The warm bread with the soft butter.
The weight of that kid on my own lap, the way her fingers would grasp at my hair and pull, but in a nice way.
Then there are a million pictures of that child and another playing in a grassy backyard.
There’s one of me with them both.
I’m in loose jeans and a sweater, my hair up in a messy bun, and I’m smiling and holding my arms open as the little girl runs toward me.
That one is from a few years ago.
And it was taken nearby.
It’s probably at Aimee’s house.
It’s tempting to follow the map and go, but I can’t do that.
I know I shouldn’t.
It’s only another hour and a half now.
I can wait.
I’ve waited this long.
Seeing Aimee and her family—and me—in a variety of settings I’ve never seen her in is like a strange dream.
Snowy Avalon.
Summery Avalon.
Coastal Ireland.
At the pub, in unfamiliar home kitchens, in a grocery store I’ve never seen.
When Aimee and I discovered the existence of Avalon, it was in a pretty unmagical way.
There used to be this website where you put in all the things you wanted out of a school and then it gave you places that might be a good fit.
I used to spend hours on that website, in a way I never have with dating apps.
Fantasizing about who I might be has always been more interesting than fantasizing about who I might be with .
One weeknight, Aimee was over for dinner and to watch the most recent Twilight movie with our moms (we had already seen it, but they hadn’t).
They were downstairs drinking wine and making spaghetti and salad and garlic bread and talking about Real Housewives , par for their course.
Aimee and I were in my room on my computer, dreaming of our future and playing on that website.
We were debating, in important tones, the value we put on class and campus size, on- and off-campus housing, in versus out of state, whether we wanted to take on loans or not.
In-state, each of our parents could pay for.
But it also meant staying in Florida.
Out-of-state opened up the whole world.
One of us said something about the whole world and that’s when we realized we weren’t even looking out of the country.
And that’s when, after factoring in small class sizes and a focus on acting, we came upon Avalon.
We did a lot of saying, wait…
wait…
wait, this is perfect…
wait…
ohmigod…
and then we went downstairs to tell our moms everything we had learned about this place that was so perfect that if we didn’t go then we would literally die, could we please go, please, please, please?
!
The answer, like with any out-of-state college, was that if we were willing to get our own financial aid, we could do whatever we wanted.
We took this as practically being accepted on the spot and jumped up and down and hugged each other, then couldn’t stop talking through dinner or the movie.
So our mothers released us from girls’ night, probably with some relief that they wouldn’t have to endure more lip-biting from Kristen Stewart, and we went upstairs to go look up everything the internet had to offer on the town and the school.
That’s pretty much how it carried on for the rest of high school.
Only, thinking about it now, I can see that Aimee’s excitement tapered off after a while.
I shut the phone screen off now, closing the portal to all the memories I would have if this life were mine.
I suppose there’s a chance my real life isn’t real, and Kiera and Jim are right—I lost my memories and replaced them with a fantastical story.
That would explain why I know to find my sweatpants and the whiskey, and why I have such a deep feeling of fondness for Kiera and Cillian.
It would also explain why, when I had come across a photo of Maureen begging happily beneath the table, there was a faint recollection or essence of a memory of how it felt to be sitting in this little front yard and playing cards late into that night with Cillian.
The taste of the chilled red wine in my juice glass, the sight of his ropey-muscled arm reaching across for a salty olive from a glazed terra-cotta bowl.
Yet, isn’t this the mental trick I use to act?
Pretending has always been my best ability.
I don’t use the power for evil; I’m not manipulative.
I don’t lie.
But I can fool people.
It’s what acting is.
The problem is that I can also fool myself.
It’s why I can get so easily into character, building a world around them in my mind.
It’s why I’m so good at denial.
It’s why I’m afraid I’ll pop my clutch and lose my mind one day.
I feel as though—or I fear as though—the curtain between reality and imagination is whisper thin in my mind.
I put down the phone and coffee, rubbing my eyes and feeling a little drained by all the information.
I get up and go over to the journals to look for clues there too.
But as Kiera said, most are empty.
Some are empty with missing pages, and some have my scrawling handwriting.
In one, I wrote the things I was grateful for each day—looks like I kept it up for about nine days.
Some entries include:
Cillian
Kiera
Butter
Maureen
Avalon
Having a TV
Short work shifts
New lotion
Meditation
I roll my eyes.
Not at meditation, but at myself for writing it.
I feel absolutely certain the other me did it weakly for about ten minutes max, for a handful of days, and then wrote it here.
Who is she kidding.
I know that because same .
Most of what I was grateful for were people and things.
Some I completely stand by, like not having to wake up for school ever ever again .
But some days other-me couldn’t come up with a third thing.
I find myself wanting to fill all the empty journals with gratitude for this mysterious other life.
The intoxicating smoky green smell of the town, the way beer really tastes different, how young and real I look with the plumpness of my cheeks and softer curves, and my God, how incredible cream and butter and salt and sugar taste.
How it feels to eat like a human.
This cottage.
The little totems of my past, proof that there is more to time than now .
Also, the friendships.
I know the other me listed Cillian and Kiera, but how did she not exclaim at the miracle that it is to have them?
And that they’re so special!
How was she not more specific, to not mention Kiera’s patience or wit, her ability to set those around her at ease (I’ve not seen her around many other people, but I can tell it’s who she is).
How funny she is, what a serious blessing it is to have someone over who knows their way around your house?
Her nonjudgmental way of talking about past moments of embarrassment.
And Cillian!
How amazing the food was that he made.
How he has to be a really good person to get dumped and then make grilled cheese and soup for the girl (he thinks) who dumped him.
And then to go on being nice enough to walk her through a panic attack.
Plus, how completely special it is for a guy that hot to not be a total fuckboy.
But I know why she didn’t go into it.
The same reason I didn’t in LA when I tried gratitude journaling.
Because it was too hard to see my world for its good when its bad was so much louder and more distracting.
There’s nothing else much in the journals, only some disjointed ideas, so I put them away and realize with disgust that I haven’t bathed since LA.
I’m starting to be able to smell my own hair, and that’s an emergency.
I’m amazed by the delightfully warm water and strong water pressure.
There’s fresh eucalyptus hanging from the shower head and all kinds of fun shampoos and conditioners and hair masks.
I kind of wish I could stay in here all day, not figuring out what’s going on in my life.
In my lives.
I get out, blow-dry my hair, put on a little makeup, and spend about twenty minutes dithering over what to wear.
I finally pick a pair of jean shorts, a clean white T-shirt, and a denim button-down over top.
I look at my phone again.
Still too early to leave.
I shoot Aimee a text.
Still on for noon, right?
She doesn’t respond right away, and it reminds me that I want to call my mom, who also didn’t answer my text.
I press her contact and sit on the edge of the bed with my foot tapping as I wait for her to answer.
My heart falls as the phone rings and rings.
Then I get her voicemail.
She sounds a little more chipper in this version than in the one I’m used to.
Hi, you’ve reached Char.
Leave a message or send me a text and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Thanks!
Char?
My mom’s other voicemail says, This is Charlotte Bryan.
Leave a message after the tone .
It’s so bizarre.
I leave her a message.
“Hey, it’s Meg. Everything’s fine. Please call me back.”
I then dial my dad.
More ringing.
Then his voicemail.
This is Kyle.
A long pause.
Leave a message.
That’s the exact same voicemail.
Somehow, that tracks.
Same old Dad.
Why is Mom’s so different?
She seems happier.
I never think of my mom as unhappy .
Neither of my parents.
They go out to dinner more than once a week, see movies I can’t believe they think they’ll like and then call me on speakerphone to talk about how much they hated them; they save up to buy new patio furniture from Costco, and then post pictures on Facebook (hellscape) of it so all their friends with names like Nancy and Rod can leave comments like Looks great!
Love, Nance and That’ll get the job done!
I mean, maybe they’re not exactly thriving.
My dad has wanted to leave his job for over a decade and my mom is always booking vacations and then canceling them, deciding the money could be better spent on things around the house.
New patio furniture, perhaps.
Who needs Cabo?
We have a new grill.
I’ve been telling them to leave that old house for years.
Telling them to get out of godforsaken Florida.
I’ve offered to contribute financially, but the very idea offends my mother and no amount of arguing could change her mind.
I don’t leave a message for Dad.
He never listens to them anyway.
He famously leaves his phone behind wherever he goes, defeating the entire purpose of having it.
Finally, it’s time to leave for Joy’s.
I bring Maureen since Kiera mentioned that there’s lots of outdoor seating at the coffee shop.
Having a dog with me always makes me feel better.
Even a dognapped one.
Possibly especially a dognapped one.
But still, it’s a tense five-minute walk for me.
I’m excited, of course, to see Aimee.
It’s been a long time.
And the last time I saw her, things were ugly, and then things were catastrophic.
But I’m also afraid.
Afraid of letting her down.
Afraid that she’ll let me down.
Afraid it’ll feel weird and awkward.
Afraid to tell the truth when it’s so impossible to believe.
Maureen has no sense of the drama, however, and is just happy to be here.
Joy’s is a little red coffee shop with an adorable storefront and open paned glass windows with boxes of flowers beneath them.
My heart pounds as I scan the faces of the patrons, looking for hers.
She’s not here.
A few people nod or wave at me in polite neighborly recognition.
I do the same, then go up to the counter.
The barista is a nice-looking guy with double ear piercings and a broad smile.
“Hey, Meg!”
“Oh.” I glance at his name tag.
“Hey, Freddy.”
I’m pretty proud of myself for my visual detective work, but then he laughs and covers the name tag.
“Oh, I know. I forgot mine at home again, so I had to wear Freddy’s. You want the usual?”
Damn.
I think Kiera was right to tell Cillian’s dad the truth, that I don’t know who anyone is.
Partly because he’s a doctor, and partly because it’s ridiculous to walk around trying to fake it constantly.
But it would also be a little absurd to lead a small interaction like this with, Hi!
I will not be able to engage in this conversation and meet your expectations of familiarity.
Please treat me like a stranger!
K, thanks!
Honestly, I should get my own name tag that says all of that.
“Usual sounds great,” I say.
“Three quid, love,” he says.
He has an English accent, not an Irish one, I realize.
“ Three?” I ask.
I’m suddenly afraid my usual is a glass of unfiltered tap water, which is about what that dollar equivalent would get you in LA.
“I know,” he says, “they raised the prices a little. But it’s temporary! Only ’til the cup dispute is figured out.”
In this world, apparently I’m up on whatever the cup dispute is.
“No, it’s fine,” I say.
“Here, keep the change.”
I hand him a five.
I found a little card wallet at the cottage, saw that it had my own identification in it, and not a lot of money, but some, tightly folded and slid in.
If looking at my other me’s nudes had felt intrusive, this felt like outright stealing.
He hands me back the change.
“Keep it,” I insist.
He gives me a weird look and I remember I didn’t look up the tipping culture.
“Ain’t gonna argue, am I?” he says, pocketing it, then starting in on my drink.
While I wait, I turn around, checking that Aimee didn’t walk in while I was ordering, and then go out onto the little flower-filled patio to double-check.
My drink is ready when I come back, so I get it and then I realize that I should go wait out front—and that’s when I run smack-dab into her, almost spilling my chai all over her white linen dress, Maureen’s leash tangling between our legs.
“Hi, Meg.”