Chapter Fourteen
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Dammit, Kay,” says Kiera, cursing her mother for her gossiping ways.
“Do you think we could go talk somewhere?” Cillian asks.
My heart skips a beat and I nod.
“Yeah, of course. Kiera, I’ll uh, I’ll be back.”
I gesture for Cillian to lead the way.
He’s dressed up today, wearing a pair of light, perfectly draping wool trousers and a sage-green button-down that looks comfortably worn in.
He’s got the kind of physique that can pull off anything, I think.
Some people can slip into Valentino and look ready for a premiere, and some people need to be tucked and nipped all over before looking right.
It’s nothing to do with attractiveness either; it’s that some people have a quality that makes everything work on them.
Cillian has that quality.
Effortless.
He leads me to a quiet part of the garden about twenty yards from the party and we sit down on a bench.
I know I was in the fray only a moment ago, but stepping away from it, I already feel like an outsider.
Aware that it’s not my life.
Jealous that it isn’t.
“So can you catch me up?” he asks, his voice low and patient.
Grumpy as he may be, I have a feeling all of our issues stem from me.
I do catch Cillian up, and his face remains impassive as he listens.
He leans over with his elbows on his knees, his finger tracing the lip of his plastic cup.
When I finish, he furrows his brow and lifts his gaze to mine.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but Meg, is this all about… well, I don’t even want to ask. I can’t imagine you’d make something like this up.”
“No, I wouldn’t. I promise you, I’m not messing with you or lying or— I mean, the only real possibility here is that I have completely lost it. But I feel fine!”
He shakes his head, looking overwhelmed, rightfully, by the information.
“You’ve been to see my dad?”
“Yes. He didn’t mention it?”
“Of course not,” he says.
“I heard about your… condition from a couple eejits at the pub last night.”
I take a moment to appreciate his dad for his discretion, fully aware that this should be a given with any doctor, but also a little too used to the frequency of mysterious leaks that make their way to Page Six.
“Your dad thinks I’m disassociating. Kiera keeps calling it time travel but doesn’t believe me either way. I mean, she believes I believe it. Aimee is the only one who seems to understand that I’ve slid dimensions. Or something.”
“You told Aimee? I suppose that’s why you’re here, then, yeah? You two put your stuff on hold in the wake of whatever this is.”
“I guess so. She invited me after I told her. And look, I do get that if I wanted to wipe the slate clean with you and Aimee, this would be one way to do it. But I would never. I could never. No matter what. It’s not me to do that.”
He nods.
“I know it’s not, Meggie.”
Hearing him say my name, my old nickname no less, makes me feel weak.
“Good.”
“Did you tell your mother? I suppose she said the same thing as my dad, then?” He says it with the slight tone of an inside joke.
I don’t get it, of course, so I answer honestly.
“I didn’t tell my mom. You think she’d think the same thing as your dad though?”
He looks at me briefly, clearly deciding whether or not to play into my apparent amnesia.
“Sure look. The way they hit it off when your parents came over here. They spent the whole trip kindred spirits. Your dad and my mother as well. The two of them got on like a house on fire, talking about music nonstop. Your mammy and my dad talked about us the whole time.”
“They did?” It gives me a strange thrill to imagine my parents here, hanging out with Cillian’s parents.
I’ve never brought my boyfriends around my family.
Even if a relationship goes on for a year or two, I always sense that it won’t work out so I don’t want to waste everyone’s time.
Plus, of course, I barely see my parents myself.
“What did they have to say about us?”
“Oh, you know.” He takes a sip of his beer.
“Same thing as everyone and always. Why aren’t the two of us married, when are we going to stop fecking around and admit we’re in love with each other. Admit there’s never going to be anything else like this for us. Admit we wouldn’t want it if we found it.”
He avoids looking at me.
My heart blows up to three times its size at these words.
It’s a completely involuntary feeling and completely unfamiliar, at that.
All those boyfriends I wasn’t bringing home—it’s also because I never felt anything like this.
How is it possible that I feel so much from his words?
I don’t even know him.
“I’m sure you can understand how difficult it is to believe. You don’t remember anything?”
“No. It’s really not a matter of remembering. I know my entire other life.”
“The one where you’re an actress.”
“Yes.”
“Right. It’s a bit funny, is all, that you’re saying it’s your other life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think it has more to do with that fortune teller than you think it does,” Cillian says.
I feel the ground fall out beneath me.
“I told you about that?”
“We’ve told each other everything. You even told me about the time you sneezed…” One half of his mouth turns upward in a wry smile.
Then I realize what story he’s talking about, because it happened when I was in high school.
“Oh my God, the pee incident? I told you about the pee incident?”
It wasn’t a lot of pee, but still I never told anyone about the sneeze-and-pee.
No one but Aimee, and it’s only because she was there and I couldn’t stop laughing and needed to explain myself.
And borrow a pair of shorts.
I laugh now, and he cracks a smile too.
“I can’t believe I told you about that. The… the fortune teller thing, I mean. The other thing either, but, uh…” I nod and look off into the sky.
“I’m sorry. Everything I’ve heard since coming here… it sounds like I was kind of exhausting.”
He shakes his head.
“Never exhausting for me. I think you exhaust yourself at times. Like when Clare cries and cries until she falls asleep in the middle of the room, little fists still balled up. Which, as I understand, you used to do as well.”
This makes me laugh again, and when I laugh, he does too.
God, his smile is beautiful.
Straight white teeth, but a tiny, tiny gap on one side between his canine and molar.
A perfect imperfection.
I’m not really sure what else to say, so I go with, “The music is fun.”
“They’re good.” He nods.
“The extent of my experience with Irish music is the dancing scene in Titanic. ”
His head falls and he says, “God, you love that bloody film.”
“It’s so good!”
“I’ll never understand how someone can find comfort in a disaster story about a tragedy that killed thousands.”
“It’s not about that.”
“If you don’t remember anything, and don’t recall the millions of times you’ve made this case to me about this movie, then does it mean you also don’t remember the ten to fifteen times you’ve made me watch it with you?”
I bite my bottom lip in response.
He exhales loudly.
“What a right waste of time that was.”
I tut my tongue and say, “Whoever you are, it seems like maybe you have no taste.”
He drops his chin at an angle, giving me a challenging stare.
“You certainly seem like the same old Meg.”
“Really?”
He looks at me and then covers his mouth as he leans back and considers me.
He lets his hand drop as he says, “You know, in a way, I sort of want to believe you forgot everything. To start over with you. We’ve made such a mess of things. I wonder if we would have been better off meeting now.”
My lips part and I say, “I don’t understand how we screwed it all up so badly.”
“I’d need several years to tell you,” he says.
“And it wouldn’t matter anyway. I don’t understand it myself.”
We both turn, then, hearing someone call his name.
It’s one of the girls who had been flirting with him at the pub, standing with her friends.
He gives them a tight smile and lifts his hand.
“You’re like Gaston with your gaggle of milkmaids,” I say.
“Ah, the Bimbettes.” When he sees my look of impressed surprise, he says, “We googled them once. That’s how they’re credited.”
They call for him again.
“You should go,” I say, and then spot Aimee.
“It’s fine.”
“I don’t need to go,” he says.
“They’re silly girls. I’d much rather talk to you, even if you don’t remember me.”
There’s a micro-expression that comes with his words.
Somehow, I believe I understand it, fleeting as it is.
I think the look is about the grief of what’s died between us, and the strange hope that maybe there’s a way to begin again, even if it is something akin to magic.
It’s a lot to translate from one little look, but I know deeply that I’m right.
Either because I know him, somehow, or because I make my living conveying complex inner stories with something as minute as a flicker of an eyelid.
He looks and sees Aimee, sees that’s where my gaze has gone, then stands.
“Glad you two are making up.”
I stand then too, smoothing the wrinkles in my dress.
He fiddles with the now-empty cup in his hands.
“It looks good on you,” he says, his eyes dropping for a moment to the dress.
“I always knew it would.”
Then he walks off, and I feel desperate to reach my hand out, grab his, and pull him back to me.
What I’d do then, I have no idea.
Well, that’s not true; I have several ideas.
Aimee has vanished by the time I get through the crowd, so I rejoin Kiera, who’s now in a conversation with a lanky, red-haired guy with an intense amount of freckles.
He’s cute, with that boyish-charm-slash-fatal-flaw that makes it seem like he can probably never take a situation seriously.
“Oh, stop it!” she’s saying, patting him on the chest.
“Meg, there you are. Thought you two might not come back.”
“Hiya, Hollywood,” says the redhead.
I take a wild guess.
“Nial?”
“Ah, see, she hasn’t forgotten everything,” he says, pointing at me.
“Is it starting to come back to you, then?” asks Kiera.
“No, I just had a feeling this was Nial.” Over his shoulder, I spot her.
“Excuse me one sec.”
I set my drink down on a nearby table and then make a beeline for her.
She’s with her children.
Aimee’s in belted, high-waisted, glen check trousers and a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up.
It looks like vintage Ralph Lauren, and it’s exactly the perfect style for her.
With her tawny skin and brunette hair, she looks like old ads from the eighties in the magazines my mom had kept.
I walk up to her and she gives me a broad smile.
“Meg. Ronan, say hi to Aunt Meggie.”
A wave of this is so fucking bizarre washes over me, but I breathe through it.
I can’t simply sit in amazement at her very existence every time I see her or I’ll freak her out.
“Do you remember her, buddy?”
He shakes his head.
“It’s okay.” I drop my voice to a whisper.
“I don’t remember meeting you either.”
He smiles bashfully and turns his head against her chest, away from me.
Ronan has piercing blue eyes and thick, shiny dark hair.
He can’t be more than three, and he looks like he’s overdue for a nap.
An unexpected wave of affection for the child comes over me.
The way his small body wraps effortlessly around hers, the way his fingers wind through a lock of Aimee’s hair.
I don’t have a lot of kids in my life.
I’m an only child without much extended family.
I don’t have a lot of adult friends with kids.
I’m awkward around them.
I say things like, Been to any good movies lately?
Which is not even how I talk to adults, so I have no idea what’s up with that.
“Oh, come on,” Aimee says to her son.
“Say hi.”
“Hi,” he says quietly.
“Hi, Ronan,” I respond.
“Hi,” he says again.
“That’s good,” Aimee says, then shrugs at me.
“We take what we can get. Clare, come here, come say hi.”
Clare comes over.
She’s in a floral dress with a fluffy little white cardigan on over top.
She gets down into that full kid squat, picking at the little rogue flowers that grow in the grass by our feet.
“Meg. I remember Meg, yes,” she says, a singsong little voice.
She does have a little accent.
Okay, again, there’s no denying that this is a cute, cute set of children.
“Auntie Meggie.”
My heart blooms again.
I feel like I could cry.
For everything.
For Aimee.
For this life of hers.
For these extensions of Aimee.
Not only has she lived, but she’s created more life.
More Aimee in the world.
“Hi, Clare. Nice to see you.”
I crouch down to her level.
“This is for you,” she says, handing me a dandelion.
“Make a wish.”
I take the flower.
Ordinarily, when a kid hands a wispy dandelion to an adult and tells her to make a wish, the grown-up usually politely says, Okay, done , not really thinking it makes much of a difference, except to keep magic alive for the little one.
But I have no idea what’s real anymore, and magic is somewhat overwhelmingly alive for me right now, so the stakes of my wish feel like they could be catastrophic.
The wish goes out of my mind as a tall tattooed man appears behind Clare, and I look up from my crouch to see Theo.
Again, ugh .
I stand and say, “Theo.”
He smiles a little, then says, “Good to see you, Meg.”
“You too,” I lie.
He seems to sense the residual bitterness in my tone, so he reaches for Ronan, and then says, “I’ll take these two over to the other kids. Let you catch up.”
He then gives a nod and walks off with the children.
“Are you still…” she asks.
“ Sliding Doors– ing?”
She nods.
There’s a distance between us that I long to close, but I know I can’t do it right this second.
I have to be patient.
Even though I want it now.
Aimee shields her eyes from the sun and looks off at Theo in the distance.
A softness appears around her eyes as she does.
I look at him too.
He’s accepted a beer from someone, and he’s chatting animatedly with another man, both keeping half an eye on their respective children.
I can’t even imagine what it feels like to gaze across a backyard and be looking at your family.
The one you created.
Kids who call you their mother.
A husband who calls you his wife.
I’ve always chosen to believe my disinterest in all of this is because I’m modern—I don’t need a wedding.
I don’t need to have kids.
I want a big life .
Which, I guess to me, means success, wealth, having a blue check, being remembered long after I’m dead.
Seeing Aimee with them—seeing the obvious joy in her as she watches them—it reminds me that there’s a part of me that does want that kind of connection.
I’m having trouble reconciling past-him with the version I see before me.
Aimee always seemed to see something in him that I didn’t.
Aimee saw something so different that even when I told her who he was she still loved him anyway.
Was she a fool, or was it love?
Is that the same thing?
Whatever the answer, it is one of my many beliefs about Aimee’s death that if it weren’t for Theo, Aimee would still be alive.
In both worlds, not just here.
Though, it’s harder to blame him for it when he’s here and she’s fine.
But that night…
“How did Theo end up in Avalon?” I ask.
“We all may as well have stayed in Florida.”
I regret saying it as she gives me a look, and I give a cringey expression of don’t hate me, it’s a joke .
She seems to choose not to give me shit for it, which I appreciate, settling on an eye roll.
She puts her hands on her hips.
“Well. We broke up when I moved. But we never lost touch. He went to community college for a while and then ended up getting accepted to Cornell.” She pauses for my shock, which I give her.
“After he graduated, I asked him to come here. I said I’d go to him, but he said he’d rather see things outside of our broken country. I told him things are broken everywhere, but he came anyway. It took some time with the visa bullshit, but eventually we were both able to settle down here because his father is from the UK. We got married a little over four years ago.”
“I heard he got fired. What was he doing?” I ask her.
“He wasn’t fired , Meg, he was laid off. He’s a plant breeding specialist. He works in genetics and plant biology to create new species.”
I can’t bring myself to look impressed even though I am.
“I guess that explains the weed he used to grow,” I say.
“Eh, not really.” She adds, “That was because he liked it.”
I see that she’s kidding, and I feel free to laugh.
We both do.
Kiera comes over with two drinks and hands them to us.
“I want to keep the conversation lubricated. Carry on.” She then does a funny little bow and runs away.
“Kiera,” Aimee says.
“Funny girl.”
“So, wait, tell me about your play,” I say, remembering.
She blushes and I watch her smile fade.
“Oh, it’s nothing. Silly. Nightmare actually.”
“I mean, you’re directing it, right? And wrote it?”
“Oh, well… yeah.”
When she offers no more explanation, I take a sip of my drink.
“Okay, so what’s it about?”
“Ah… friendship? I suppose?”
The way she doesn’t meet my eyes tells me it might be in part inspired by our friendship.
“I can’t wait to see it.”
She looks suddenly stressed.
“If it happens.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean… I don’t have a second act. So.”
“What? How? Isn’t it—”
She gives me a deathly glare and I back down.
She relents a little and says, “I know it’s ridiculous, but we got this chance to have the show seen by this critic. I met him at a writer meetup thing in Dublin. I mentioned it, he liked the general idea, and since he’d apparently heard good things about my past work, he said he’d come to my next one. I have these girls in it and they’re not connecting with it, I can tell, and I’ve been rewriting, and then this weekend I detonated the whole second act. It’s not that long, it’s sort of experimental anyway, so the actors were down to… oh my God, I shouldn’t even be out here. I should be inside working on it.”
Aimee looks massively overwhelmed.
And I don’t blame her.
Nuking the whole second act a week before performance night is, objectively, batshit.
But I’m not surprised.
Aimee never thought anything she did was good enough.
She once threw away an entire Funfetti birthday cake we made for her mom because it wasn’t good enough.
How boxed cake could be anything but, ya know, boxed cake, I had and have no idea.
“Well… maybe I could help.”
She flushes a deeper shade of red.
“No, no, I’m fine.”
For me, it’s essential to spend as much time as possible with her.
For her, I’m a friend from whom she’s been estranged.
I get that she doesn’t quite know how to be around me.
I probably wouldn’t either.
“This critic thing sounds like a big deal.”
“God, don’t remind me.” She takes a big swig of her drink.
“Look, I know you’re mad at me. But let me help. I’m not saying I’m a savant or anything, but I’ve been in Hollywood awhile now. I’m also not saying anyone can write a script. But maybe I could be of some use. I’ve picked up a thing or two being there, you know. In LA.”
“Yes, I noticed your makeup.”
“Okay, how bad at makeup was— Forget it. Anyway, yeah, if it’s about friendship, I mean… I’ve had a friend before.”
She looks at me and then can’t help but laugh a little.
There’s a space between us, and I try to find a way to fill it in.
“I went over to the school yesterday.”
“Oh yeah?” she says, nonplussed.
“Yeah. It was really weird. Seeing it in real life. Remember how we used to obsess about it? Looking up every image on Google. They’re burned into my brain. I obviously never ended up seeing it, ’til now.”
And neither did you .
She seems to remember then that it was my first time, and says, “Oh, right! So how was it? Did you see any teachers?”
“Yes, actually. Professor Lehman?”
Her eyebrows shoot up.
“Ooh. Tough cookie.”
“I got that vibe.”
“What happened?”
“She asked my opinion on a scene between two kids. I made a suggestion and then… she had me act it out for them.”
“How did that go?”
“It was fun! I actually stayed for a bit and watched. It made me even sadder I didn’t get to do that. Go to school here, learn that way.”
“This is so weird. Obviously I remember you doing it. We used to sit in the back of Professor Lehman’s class and imitate her.”
I think of her lilting English-Irish accent and say, “I can see that.”
“ Do the scene again, but this time try to move less like an ostrich, yes?” she says, in a perfect imitation of Professor Lehman.
“ Once more please, try not to sound as if your mouth is full of ice cubes. ”
I laugh, and she does too.
“Oh my God! Yes! I can totally see it.”
She shakes her head, nostalgic.
“She’s something else.”
There’s a long silence.
“Come on, let me help with the show,” I say, pushing her a little on the shoulder.
“I’m good at this!”
“You really want to?”
“Yes!” Of course I do.
And honestly it sounds like a shitshow.
“Okay. Sure. Maybe tomorrow? Or, no, the stage will be booked tomorrow. But we don’t necessarily need the stage—”
“How about at my place? At the cottage?” If she used to live there, then maybe being back will shake up her positive memories of all our good times.
“Yeah, sounds good. Noon?”
“Perfect.”
“Okay,” she says on a long exhale.
“I’m going to go reprieve Theo. Thanks for coming.”
“Of course.”
Of course .
I mean.
Where the hell else would I be, given the chance?
She goes off, running with open arms to her daughter when she gets close.
Kiera is deep in flirtation with Nial.
I go inside and ask someone where the bathroom is.
They look at me like I’m crazy, and then point me down the hall.
I can’t figure out why at first, but then remember that they probably think I ought to know where it is.
In Aimee’s home.
That, or I forgot to call it the jacks .
There’s a line at the bathroom, so I follow my instincts and go upstairs, looking for another one.
I have a feeling there’s one up and to the left.
I find a door shut with the light on.
I don’t know if I’m right that it’s the bathroom or not, so I wait awkwardly for a moment.
Right when I’m about to give up, the door opens and Cillian comes out.
“Oh. Hi.”
“Hi,” I say.
We then move past each other, swapping places.
I’m about to shut the door when I see he’s still standing there.
A muscle twitches in his jaw.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s odd. We’ve had a whole life together, and you have no idea about any of it.”
I shake my head slowly.
“No. I wish I did.”
“I could tell you things that would make your hair curl,” he says.
I struggle to come up with a clever answer, managing to stop myself from saying something dumb like, Well then, maybe you should curl my hair .
“Do you want to know?” he asks.
There’s a trill in my chest and I nod.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” he says.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
“Okay.” I start to follow him, then say, “I’m actually going to—”
“Right. I’ll wait downstairs.”
Then I pee, check my makeup and hair, and take a few deep breaths before going to find him.