Chapter 7 #3
Eventually the crying burns itself out. My body goes heavy, almost boneless. Jessica gets me water. I drink three sips because she tells me to, and because obeying simple instructions is easier than thinking.
She takes me to the guest room, gives me a shirt and a pair of soft pants, and turns her back while I change even though we've shared dressing rooms, hotel rooms, and one deeply unfortunate spray tan incident. The privacy makes my eyes sting again.
I crawl into her bed. Jessica tucks the blanket around me with brisk, bossy hands. “The door's open. If you need me, say my name.”
“Okay.”
The room is dark except for the hallway light. At some point, delirium takes me and I imagine Sebastian is standing there, reaching out for me, just like he did on the porch. That's the last thing I remember before sleep takes me.
When I wake, the room is gray.
For one suspended second, I don’t know where I am.
The ceiling is wrong. The pillow smells like Jessica’s lavender detergent instead of the clean cedar scent of the sheets at home.
There's a crack in the paint near the window shaped like a lightning bolt, and I stare at it while memory returns with cruel patience.
The house. Katrina. Sebastian’s voice. My ring on the table.
I wait for the pain to hit the way it did last night. It doesn’t. Instead, there is numbness. Wide and flat. A frozen field where my chest used to be.
I sit up slowly. My head aches. My eyes feel swollen. Someone has put a glass of water and two tablets on the nightstand, along with a sticky note in Jessica’s slanted handwriting.
Hydrate and stay off the internet. There's nothing new there. I just know you.
Below it, in smaller letters:
I love you.
I pick up the note and press it against my mouth. My phone is beside the water, still turned off. I don’t turn it on.
The house is quiet. Jessica must have left for work. The thought of her in the bakery, rolling fondant and stacking cake tiers for happy people who still believe the vows will hold, makes something twist faintly in my stomach.
I get up because staying in bed feels dangerous. Not dramatic dangerous. Quiet dangerous. The kind where hours can disappear and take pieces of you with them.
In the bathroom, I splash water on my face and avoid looking too closely in the mirror. I see enough. Pale skin. Red eyes. Hair tangled around my shoulders. My left hand bare.
Downstairs, the kitchen smells like coffee.
Jessica set the machine before she left.
There's a mug waiting beside it and a plate covered with a towel.
Toast. Slightly overdone, because Jessica can make wedding cakes that look beautiful but burns toast if left unsupervised for more than ninety seconds.
I pour coffee. The first sip is too hot and bitter. I drink it anyway.
That's when I see the paper on the table. A printout. Jessica has circled something in red pen and drawn three arrows around it.
OPEN AUDITIONS
Steel Magnolias
Community Theater Production
Auditions this week. Roles available. All experience levels considered.
For a moment, I only stare. Then I laugh once under my breath, and it comes out thin. “Oh, Jessica.”
I know exactly what she's doing. She's not subtle. My sister's never been subtle a day in her life.
My fingers move over the audition notice. Steel Magnolias. I know the play. Of course I know it. Women holding each other through joy and grief and impossible loss. Women laughing because the alternative is falling apart in public. Women surviving the kind of pain that alters a room.
My throat tightens. “I can’t do this,” I say to the empty kitchen.
The empty kitchen offers no argument. Jessica’s red arrows do.
I look at the laptop she left open on the other side of the table. The audition form is already pulled up. Name. Contact information. Roles of interest. Prior experience. Conflicts.
My sister's a menace. My sister's also right more often than I enjoy admitting.
I sit there for a long time with my coffee cooling beside me and my hand resting near the trackpad. I think of Sebastian saying my name on the porch. I think of Katrina’s small triumphant smile. I think of Janine moving me out of photographs like I was furniture placed wrong.
Then I think of a stage. Not a grand one.
Not Austen Parks. Not cameras. Not reporters looking for a prettier story.
A community theater stage with scuffed floors and bad backstage lighting and people who might not care whose wife I am.
A place where I can stand under lights because I chose to, not because someone allowed me into the edge of a frame.
I pull the laptop closer. My fingers hover over the keys.
Name.
For a second, I don’t know what to type. Chloe Austen feels like a bruise. Chloe Pennington feels like a door I haven’t opened in years.
My eyes burn again, but I don’t cry. Not yet.
Slowly, carefully, I type: Chloe Pennington Austen.
Then I delete Austen.
I stare at the screen. My pulse beats once, hard.
It's just my name in a little white box. Small. Inadequate. Maybe temporary.
Mine.
I move to the next line and begin to fill out the form.