Chapter 27
The Move
ZOE
I’d forgotten the five a.m. morning outside: gray light, crisp air, and the peacefulness that comes with a city asleep.
Now that Eli’s gone… Jesus, I can’t believe Gwen took him like that, Maddie’s able to come with me on the drive to Seattle.
This morning, my Jeep’s filled to the brim with all the stuff I had stored in my parents’ garage. I wear leggings, a hoodie I stole from Maddie, and the expression of a woman pretending to be a bad ass. Behind me, the front door bangs open, and my sister staggers out hauling a duffel bag.
“Okay, so I packed snacks,” she says. “And by snacks I mean I cleaned out the pantry. Mom’s gonna come downstairs and think we got robbed.”
“Did you grab the pretzels?”
“Obviously.” She drops the duffel at my feet, breathing hard. “I also grabbed those weird seaweed things because they were there. They’re going to Seattle now.”
“Seaweed deserves a fresh start.”
“Seaweed has been through a lot.”
She grins at me. I grin at her, and neither makes it far up our faces. We’re both terrible at this, and we both know it, which is honestly the most comforting thing about this.
I pop the trunk and we finish packing the car in the way people who’ve packed a lot of cars together do. Suitcase under the window. Box of books behind the suitcase. The big bag of toiletries wedged between the wheel well and the laundry basket filled with clean laundry.
Maddie hands me items like a surgical nurse. Scarf. Pillow. Plant. Backpack. “Coats in the back seat.”
“Right.”
“You want the playlist queued before we leave or after we hit the highway?”
“Before. I can’t deal with merging and DJing.”
“Got it.”
She climbs into the passenger seat. I do one last walk around the car.
Tire. Tire. Tire. Tire. Trunk latched. Lights on.
I look up at the house. The porch light is still on.
Mom said her goodbye last night with a casserole and a long hug and the words “call me when you get there, or I will call the state troopers,” which is just Mom for I love you.
Dad waved from the recliner and said, “Drive safe, sweet pea,” which is Dad for the same thing.
I get in the car and close the door. Maddie clicks her seatbelt and shoves her phone into the dock and pulls up a playlist titled, in her actual phone, “ZOE’S BIG STUPID brAVE ADVENTURE.”
“I hate you,” I tell her.
“You love me.”
“Both.”
I back out of the driveway onto the street that’s empty.
I’ve definitely missed Dickens at this hour.
I drive past the dark diner. Past the river, fog sitting on it like a damp sheet.
Past the turn that would take me, if I let it take me, up the hill and over and into Jonah Holt’s driveway, where his porch light would also be on because he leaves it on for Eli, and where a Lego Death Star would be sitting on a dining room shelf, half-built, waiting for someone who’s not going to be there to finish it.
I don’t take the turn.
I take the on-ramp.
Maddie talks for an hour and forty minutes straight.
I’m not exaggerating. I clocked it because I needed something to do with my brain that wasn’t the other thing my brain wanted to do.
Maddie talks about Hunter, how his mother never liked her.
Hunter’s dog, which she misses more than Hunter.
She talks about how it feels to be furious and relieved at the same time.
“And the worst part,” she says, eating a pretzel out of the bag in her lap, “is that I had this whole future mapped out, you know? We were going to move into that brick building downtown, the one with the windows. And get a cat. And he was going to start his own thing, finally, instead of working for his stupid uncle. And I was going to do my masters. And then he just—nope. Out. Bye. Have a nice life. I’m going to focus on me. ”
“He said that?” I ask, even though I’ve heard this story before.
“He said it with a straight face, Zo. I almost asked him what he had been focusing on for eighteen months if it wasn’t himself.”
“Strong question.”
“I didn’t ask it because I was busy crying.”
“Also valid.”
“I cried so hard I gave myself a sinus headache. I was crying and snotting and also kind of laughing because I knew I was going to write about it later.”
She crunches another pretzel. The road unspools in front of us, gray and wet and empty.
“Anyway,” she says, “I’m fine. I’m great. I’m thriving. I am a phoenix rising from the ashes.”
“Big phoenix energy.”
“Huge.”
Clearly, she is not fine. I know it because I’m her sister and because every twelve minutes, she goes quiet for thirty seconds and then starts again on a new topic, like she’s afraid of what will happen if too much air lingers in the car.
I let her have it. I get it. I am, technically, doing the exact same thing, just at a lower volume.
Around mile two hundred, somewhere in the lumpy nowhere of southern Washington State, the gas light blinks on.
“Pit stop,” I announce.
“Thank God. I have to pee so bad I’m going to ruin the upholstery.”
The gas station is the kind that has a hand-lettered sign reading WE HAVE WORMS, which I assume refers to bait, but it could be a confession. The coffee comes out of a machine that has not been cleaned since… ever? We get two of them anyway, plus a bag of jerky and a decent banana.
Outside, the wind has teeth. We lean against the side of the car while the pump does its slow chugging thing, two cardboard cups in our hands.
Maddie sips her coffee. Makes a face. Sips again. “This tastes like punishment.”
“Yeah.”
“What did we do?”
“Exist.”
“That tracks.”
Then she says, very casually, “So. Jonah.”
I glance at the pump. The numbers are climbing. “Yeah.”
“What actually happened?”
“I told you.”
“You told me the press release version. I want the long one.”
“There isn’t a long one.”
“Zoe.”
“There isn’t.”
“Zoe.”
She hasn’t raised her voice. She doesn’t have to. Maddie has, since she was four years old, possessed the ability to simply wait until I crack. She sips her terrible coffee. She looks at me. She doesn’t blink.
I crack.
“I took this job offer,” I say. “The one I’ve been wanting since I was twelve, and I watched the news in our parents’ living room and decided I wanted to be the person who made it.” I wave my coffee around. “You know. My dream.”
“Right. I know because I’m your nanny replacement.”
“Right.” I glance at the pump. Still climbing. “But I was waiting.”
“For?”
“Him to ask me to stay.”
She just lets that sit as the wind moves through the parking lot and lifts a candy wrapper and sets it down again.
“It started on the countertop.”
“Jesus, Zoe.”
“I know. Then he threw me that networking party in the ballroom, and that whole night was a dream. Then, he came into my room after we put Eli to bed. He just—he knocked, and he came in, and he didn’t have shoes on, Maddie, which sounds silly, I know it sounds silly—”
“It’s not silly.”
“—and we, you know. We did the thing, but this time, it wasn’t animal.”
She groans. “Okay, I’m here for you because I love you, but can you never say that word, in that context, about you, to me ever again.”
“Sorry. It wasn’t a casual thing. He looked at me like—” I shake my head. “I don’t know. Like he was memorizing me.”
“Okay.”
“And it was, like. It was everything. His hand on my back so many times. The way he looked at me over Eli’s head one night when we were doing the Death Star.
The Death Star, Maddie, like a four-thousand-piece Lego set.
Do you understand how long it takes to build a Lego Death Star?
We spent hours on the living room rug. And he kept looking at me like—”
“Yeah.”
“And I kept thinking, okay. Okay. This a real thing. And I told myself I was going to tell him about the job and see what happened. I was going to give him the chance to—” I stop. “I was going to give him the chance.”
“And.”
“And I sat across the kitchen island, and I told him about my travel vouchers and working remotely. Long distance could be doable. And his whole face just—” I close my hand into a fist, then open it.
“Closed. Like a door. He said that I needed to focus on work, but when I was in town seeing family, we could do lunch.”
Maddie scoffs. “Do lunch?”
“Exactly. Then he offered me severance and a bonus.”
“He offered you money.”
“He offered me money,” I echo.
“To leave.”
“He didn’t put it like that.”
“That is exactly what he did.”
The pump clicks off. I don’t move. “Yeah,” I say. “Well.”
Maddie doesn’t say anything for a full minute. Which is, for Maddie, a record. She drinks her terrible coffee and looks at the side of my face that’s getting wind burn.
Finally, she says, “He’s an ass.”
A laugh comes out of me. A sharp, broken one, the kind that wasn’t supposed to make it past my teeth.
And then, before I can put the lid back on, my eyes are full, and my throat is closing, and a hot wet line streams down my cheek at a gas station parking lot in the middle of Washington state with a sign that says WE HAVE WORMS.
Maddie reaches over and takes my hand, the one that isn’t holding the coffee. She just holds it. Tight. “Yeah,” she says, after a minute. “I’m sorry.”
I wipe my face with my hoodie sleeve, which is gross, and I don’t care. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
I nod. She squeezes my hand, then pulls me into a hug. The pump beeps at me, but we just stand in the wind for another minute, holding each other.
Back on the road, the country goes from brown to green in a long gradient. Pine trees start showing up again. Then more pine trees.
Maddie puts her feet up on the dashboard, which she knows I hate, and I don’t say anything about it, which she knows means I love her.
“Remember the fort?” she says after a while.
“The summer one. With the sheets.”
“Three days, Zoe. We refused to come inside for three days. We made Mom bring us peanut butter sandwiches on a tray.”
“We had a rope.”
“We had a rope! We pulled the tray in with the rope!”
“And then you spilled the lemonade and Mom said no more tray service.”
“Tyranny.”
“I think about that fort a lot, actually. Like, structurally. It was an impressive build.”
“It was the best fort. I’m telling you. We peaked. We were six and nine, and we peaked.”
I laugh, and it’s the kind that uses my whole stomach.
“Do you remember the bracelet?” she says, after a beat.
“Maddie.”
“I was eight, Zo.”
“You hid the broken pieces in a shoebox. For two years.”
“I was scared!”
“You CONFESSED in the church parking lot.”
“I had a religious experience! I felt guilty!”
“You felt guilty because Mom was about to find the shoebox, and you knew it.”
“Same thing.”
“It really isn’t.”
She’s laughing now, that snorting laugh of hers that has no dignity, and I’m laughing too.
And for one whole minute, I’m not thinking about anything else but a shoebox under a bed and a fort in a tree and the smell of our parents’ kitchen at six in the evening, that exact specific smell, burnt toast and dryer sheets and whatever Mom was making for dinner.
Maddie goes quiet. The road hums beneath us. The wipers come on automatically because the sky’s decided to spit on the windshield.
“I don’t know what my life looks like now, Zo. Like. I don’t know what I want. I had it all mapped out, and now the map is wrong, and I don’t know how to draw a new one.”
“You’ll draw one.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you drew the first one.”
She thinks about that, looking out the window at the pine trees and the rain. “That’s a good answer, actually.”
“I have my moments.”
She reaches over the console and finds my hand again and squeezes it. “We are a mess.”
“Catastrophically.”
“You think we’ll be okay?”
I don’t answer right away. Somewhere far ahead of us, the highway is curving toward a city full of strangers. Somewhere far behind us, a nine-year-old is going to wake up in another strange bedroom, and his dad is going to wake up to a very empty house.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I think we’ll be okay.”
I’m not entirely sure I believe me. But Maddie nods like she does, and that is enough for now.
The Seattle skyline shows up the way Seattle shows up: not all at once, not with any kind of announcement, just a slow gray accumulation of buildings out of a slow gray sky, like the city is being drawn in pencil while you watch.
The Space Needle pokes up. The Sound shows up on our left, flat and steel-colored and enormous.
Maddie sits up and takes her feet off the dashboard without being asked.
“There it is,” she says.
“There it is.”
“You okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fair.”
I’m not okay. I’m also—and this is the part I did not expect—glad. The kind of glad you feel under your ribs, low and steady, the kind that is not loud enough to be excitement, and not soft enough to be peace.
I’m doing this.
I look at the city through the windshield wipers and I think about being twelve years old in our parents’ living room, watching a woman in a blazer deliver the news from a desk in a city I’d never been to, and thinking, that. I want to be the one who makes that.
I still want to make that.
And if I don’t, I’ll find out, no regrets.
I’m also not going to wake up tomorrow in a guest room down the hall from a nine-year-old who’s just decided to trust me. I am not going to hear the six-inch creak of a closet door. I’m not going to feel a hand at the small of my back. I am not going to be in a kitchen with two stools beside mine.
Both. Both are true.
Maddie watches me. She’s always been better at this than I have given her credit for.
“You can want both things,” she says. “You’re allowed.”
I don’t say anything. I just keep driving.
The exit comes up. I take it. The hotel is one of those long-stay places, and there’s a parking spot near the door, and the rain is doing what rain does in Seattle.
I put the car in park and sit with my hands on the wheel.
“Hey,” Maddie says.
“Yeah.”
“You did it.”
“I drove a car.”
“You drove a car five hundred miles. With me in it. While crying. While listening to my breakup playlist three times. You did it.”
“Three times?”
“It’s a good playlist.”
We look at each other. She’s wearing eyeliner from yesterday, a stained sweatshirt, a pretzel crumb on her chin, and she’s the best person I know.
“Thank you,” I say. “For coming.”
“Shut up.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do. Shut up.”
She gets out of the car and stretches. She looks up at the sky and blinks because a raindrop falls in her eye.
I sit with my hands on the wheel and let myself feel all of it at once—the grief and the love and the old dream finally landing under my wheels, and the new dream I’m not yet ready to give a name to—and then I take a breath, and I let it out, and I open the door, and I step into the city.