Chapter 6 ciğerpare #2
Because sometimes I imagined what life would be like in that other universe where Harrie survived.
Or maybe the universe where she never went to the West Coast, and I never went to New York, and we opened up a little flower shop in Durham.
I’m sure it would have been a lovely little life, our families telling everyone we were more like sisters than friends.
I could see it, hazy, in my head: She would be married by now to Sanchez.
We’d buy houses beside each other. Build a gate in the fence between our backyards so her dogs could run around in mine.
We’d have game nights on the weekends, and pile into her minivan with however many kids she wanted to have and take summer trips to the ocean.
And on perfect evenings, Harrie, with her dark braided hair and an infectious smile, would sit on her back porch while I sat on mine, both of us shouting gossip over the fences and lamenting over last night’s episode of Love Island while plotting next season’s bouquets.
Yes. It would have been perfect.
“But what do you imagine for your life?” the imaginary Harriett in that imaginary world would ask me. “Where are your dogs? Your partner? What’s your dream?”
Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I could almost see it. Sometimes, if I concentrated, I could feel the tug of homesickness in my middle—what had Harrie called it? Fernweh?—and if I was brave enough I’d chase that feeling wherever it led. But I never did.
And now I didn’t want to.
It felt pointless somehow.
I downed the glass of water and refilled it. The cup was decorated with little swirls of flowers. All the dishware and silverware were, apt for a gardener’s cottage, but it was a little too quaint and on theme for my liking.
Corny, even.
Harrie used to laugh and tell me I was allergic to corny. “But that’s what makes life magical,” she once said, when we’d rented out an Airbnb near Asheville, where everything was themed to Lord of the Rings. “We deserve a little corny sometimes, Soph.”
I wish I had done more corny things with her.
I wish we’d stayed at more corny rentals, and watched more corny movies, and read more corny books.
I would’ve bought a boom box and played “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” up at her bedroom window every night for the rest of my life if it meant that she’d still be in it.
Harriett would’ve loved this cottage. She would’ve loved staying here at Lilymoor. There was this . . . otherness to everything. As if the estate itself were alive and I’d stepped into a fairy tale, where everything was soft and slow.
I could lose myself to the patience of this place.
That was dangerous.
“How was Eddie’s budget meeting?” I asked, changing the subject as I refilled the pitcher of water in the sink.
On the kitchen sill was a rather wilty fern that I watered again—I wasn’t sure it’d make it, but I’d try.
I always liked the hopeless cases, Harrie said.
I plucked off a few shriveled leaves. In Victorian England, ferns represented magic, fascination, a secret bond of love.
Perfect for this cottage, really.
“He said everyone seemed on board with it, though that one council lady he always has problems with tried to pick a fight on the proposed penny tax. I know he’s looking forward to vacation next week.
” And she rattled on about Eddie’s job. He was a county accountant, so wildly different from Mom’s job, and yet they fit together like peanut butter and jelly.
I’d never seen Mom so happy. Even when they were bickering, they were happy.
When I was growing up, Mom and I moved around a lot.
She was a travel nurse, so she pulled me all across the country with her and her small army of potted plants.
She’d shove me, and her monstera and her pothos and her money tree, into the back seat and off we went.
I never heard Mom talk to anyone the way she did her plants, loving and with the utmost admiration, until she met Eddie.
“I’m sure vacation will be great,” I said, putting the water pitcher back into the refrigerator, and opened the freezer. “Drink a margarita for me.”
“You could come,” she tempted.
“I can’t. There’s so much to do here.” Which was an understatement. There was a little too much to do, but it was work that distracted me—and it was a lovely distraction. “And could you imagine me leaving a month into this job? I couldn’t do that.”
To my own reputation or to Lilymoor.
“You wouldn’t anyway, you’re too responsible,” Mom agreed with a sigh. I heard her banging around the kitchen, probably making a late dinner while a recorded episode of Jeopardy! blared in the background. Eddie’s favorite. “I know that they are very glad to have you. I just wish I had you, too.”
“I know.” I took out a TV dinner. “Anyway, I’m bone-tired and have an early morning.”
“You always have an early morning, sprout.”
“So I should probably fix myself something to eat and go to bed.”
“I hope it’s not another TV dinner,” she remarked, and I winced.
“It’s not.” I put the TV dinner back into the freezer and opened up the refrigerator instead, taking out a bag of salad.
“Good. Because you should not subsist on meat loaf and macaroni alone.”
“I could . . .”
“Treat yourself like you treat your flowers, sprout,” she said softly. “Be kind.”
“I will. I love you.” I felt a tug of homesickness as I always did when I said it. I missed her hot cocoas at midnight and the smell of her cigarette smoke on her sweaters, and her hugs. “You and Eddie should come visit. It’s beautiful up here. You’d love it.”
“I’ll think about it. You know we traveled so much I’m now a homebody,” she replied.
She’d only visited me once in the city since I moved up there ten years ago, so I could’ve guessed her answer.
But still, I asked even though I already knew her answer.
“Just . . . be careful near those cliffs? I’m worried about you living in that cottage all alone.
You never know what kind of murderers are out there,” she went on.
“Mom,” I begged. “I’m fine.”
“I know, I know. I love you! Good night, sprout!”
“Good night.”
I hung up and dropped my phone onto the table, and stared dejectedly down at the bag of salad in my hand.
“Be kind,” she had told me. Well, kindness was not eating a salad without any dressing, so I put it back and opened the freezer again.
I could eat a frozen chicken dinner instead …
but then Mom would probably sense it from hundreds of miles away and send me a care package with green juices and packets of vitamin C.
With a groan, I pulled my hands through my brown pixie cut.
It was growing out from where I’d shaved it months before, still at the most awkward length it could be.
The cut had been impromptu, much like the move to Maine, except I hadn’t done the haircut alone.
I still dreamed of the night I showed up at Harrie’s door-step with a bottle of wine and a men’s shaver in a Walmart bag, and went into the bathroom with her.
We unscrewed the cork and passed the bottle between us while we shaved our heads together.
Harrie had already started to lose her hair, anyway.
I didn’t ask her about the time she spent keeping her diagnosis from me, and she didn’t ask how I found out (San-chez, her fiancé).
We did a terrible job with the shaver and had to go to a salon the next morning with hangovers, but I didn’t regret it.
We ended up shaving our heads every few months after that, a bittersweet sort of tradition.
I didn’t have a lot of big feelings about my hair.
It was brown and wavy and never did what I wanted it to.
But Harrie loved her hair a lot. She always put masks on it and bought the most expensive shampoo, and it would shine so healthily I even found myself envious sometimes.
This was the one sacrifice that was easy for me to make, so she didn’t feel alone.
No one tells you that when you lose your best friend, no one laughs at your jokes anymore.
Or if they do, you don’t hear it because you keep listening for a voice that no longer exists.
No one tells you that when the phone rings, you pick it up expecting your best friend.
No one tells you that you have to eat the whole appetizer now when you go out to Chili’s.
Or that you’ll go alone to romcoms and laugh at a joke and look over to the seat where your best friend was supposed to be—
And remember.
Over and over and over again.
The loneliness was so heavy and so unremarkable, I couldn’t explain it even if I tried. I felt like a flower too full of rain, bending down to the earth because the water was just too much. It wasn’t like the loss of a spouse, or the loss of a parent, or a sibling—it was different.
Bigger.
There was a word for that, but I couldn’t think of it, so I sat down at the kitchen table where a small brown journal sat beside a Magic 8 Ball, and I flipped through it until I found the one I was looking for.
Ci?erpare. The word for someone you loved as much as your own vital organs.
Knowing the word made me feel better. It put a name to this anchor.
I closed the journal and sat back, staring at the Magic 8 Ball.
No one at Lilymoor knew Harrie, or knew about our promise to return here, or the hell I’d gone through this last year. I didn’t want them to know, either. I didn’t want that look of pity, the soft “Are you okay?” because I was tired of answering “Yes.”
I was only ever really truthful around Harrie, anyway.
I picked up the Magic 8 Ball. It was heavy in my hands—heavier than a normal one, anyway. It was the first thing I unpacked from my suitcase when I arrived at the beginning of June.
“Am I wasting my time?” I asked and shook it.
The die in the middle spun in the dark liquid and settled on ASK AGAIN LATER.